


you've arrived at last, my friend

by teenageraccoon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Conditioning, Dissociation, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Insomnia, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Separation Anxiety, Smut, bucky has Opinions about baseball
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-02-18 12:30:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 61,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21561175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teenageraccoon/pseuds/teenageraccoon
Summary: It’d be easy enough for him to move silently, slip out through the window, down the fire escape and away from Steve and his little Brooklyn apartment. He doesn’t have to stay, wouldn’t have to come back. Doesn’t have to but can.He thinks he wants to.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 42
Kudos: 198





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Standard warning for Hydra captivity and everything that went along with that. This fic uses Marvel canon up to and including CA Winter Soldier, but nothing after that (with the exception of Alpine the cat taken from the comic books, because I love her).

The first rain comes at the end of October. It brings with it a heavy fog and the smell of petrichor and a snag in Steve’s morning routine, being that the tables outside the nearby Starbucks are too wet for him to sketch on per usual. He contemplates sitting inside and decides it’s not to the same effect, and orders his coffee and exits.

He doesn’t expect there to be anyone else in the little outdoor patio area. There usually isn’t.

He doesn’t expect the person there wearing ratty, ill-fitting clothes with the sweatshirt hood pulled up to hide their face to have a metal arm, silver shining at the wrist before it disappears into the sweatshirt pocket.

His breathing and heartbeat both hitch for a moment. He sits down, any and all concerns about water be damned, and tries to make himself as unimposing as possible. He doesn’t pull out his phone or anything from his backpack, just sits and waits. Slowly, step by step, Bucky inches closer until he’s close enough that Steve can speak to him without having to raise his voice at all.

“Hi, Bucky,” is what he says, because he doesn’t know what else he can say. Bucky doesn’t look at him, or maybe more accurately, doesn’t look at his face. His eyes are trained steadily on the ground. Steve has so many questions: are you safe, hungry, tired, hurt?, but the one he asks is, “Are you okay?”

Bucky nods once, jerking, still not looking at Steve. Steve doesn’t believe it, can’t after reading the file Natasha gave him, but it’s something. It’s an answer. He can work with it.

“That's good, Bucky. I’m glad.” When there’s no response, he lets his impulse win over, and says “My apartment isn’t far.” Bucky looks up at him from under his hood and doesn’t quite meet his eyes, but Steve can tell he’s trying, and that the trying is taking a lot of effort. “You can come back with me, if you want.” And then Steve thinks that might be too forward, so he quickly amends it by adding, “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to–” and God, how he hopes Bucky wants to, “–you can shower, and eat, and…” He peters off, because Bucky is still staring at him and he’s starting to ramble nervously.

“There's not just–” Bucky starts to say, his voice sounding painfully raspy, but then he freezes. He looks back down to the table, visible tense, and Steve guesses that he’s desperately trying to maintain his composure. Steve doesn’t say anything, just allows Bucky to collect himself the best he can and only speaks when Bucky’s eyes flit back up to his face for the briefest of moments.

“I’m going to get out a sketchbook so I can write my address down,” he says, because he thinks Bucky deserves some forewarning before he reaches into his backpack. “You don’t have to come, and if you do, you don’t have to stay. But you can, okay?” Bucky nods sharply again, and Steve can’t help but worry that it’s only Bucky’s response because it’s what Bucky thinks Steve _wants_ him to respond. Steve pulls out his sketchbook and pencil and writes his address on the corner of a page, adds his phone number on second thought, and then tears out the corner.

And then, because he’s apparently stopped thinking altogether, he holds the slip of paper out to Bucky.

Bucky jerks away, the chair he’s standing next to scraping violently ( _angrily_ , Steve corrects himself, because _violent_ isn’t a word he’s going to throw around loosely) against the pavement. Steve startles and pulls his arm back immediately, starting to apologize before he’s fully processed what happened. Bucky is significantly farther away, hunched over and watching Steve like a hawk, both hands shoved deep in his pockets.

“Sorry,” Steve says, “Bucky, I didn’t mean to scare you, you can come back, I won’t…okay.” He stops himself when he sees Bucky’s hand fly behind him, presumably to grab one of the many weapons Steve’s pretty sure Bucky has on himself. “I’m going to go inside and fix my coffee because it’s still too bitter, and I’ll leave my address here.” He stands up carefully and lifts his backpack onto one shoulder, then turns around and goes back into the Starbucks. It takes effort not to turn back to look at Bucky, but he manages to make his way back into the Starbucks without doing so.

The statement about his coffee had been a lie—and one he’s pretty sure that Bucky picked up on, at that—but he doesn’t think that Bucky would move back towards the table with Steve still sitting right there. Not to mention that it’s a blatant display of trust on Steve’s part, making himself open to attack with no warning. He doesn’t think Bucky wants to fight him, he’s gotten no indication of any emotion except for sheer terror, but he hopes that Bucky understands the action for what is, whether he’s conscious of it or not.

Steve pours more creamer into his coffee because he’s a man of his word, and because he’s pretty certain that Bucky is still watching him. He takes a little longer than necessary to stir it in, puts the lid back on, and goes outside again.

The patio is empty. Aside from the crooked chair, there’s no sign of Bucky ever having been there. The slip of sketchbook paper with Steve’s address and phone number on it is still laying on the table. Steve lets out an audible sigh and looks around for Bucky, already knowing that he’s not going to see him unless Bucky wants to be seen, and starts the couple blocks’ walk back to his apartment alone.

He considers texting Sam, once he’s sat on the couch with his now-ruined coffee in hand, and quickly decides better of it. He has no clue what comes next; none of the endless scenarios he ran through with Sam or Nat or even Tony with his nonstop “and then what?” prompting had included an option for “he’ll come back to me while I’m busy lamenting that the table outside a coffee-chain is too dewey to draw on.” And, as much as he hates to admit it, he has no idea what Sam’s reaction would be. Or anyone else’s for that matter. He likes that Sam is his friend, the closest non-work friend he’s had in a long time, but he doesn’t know how he would respond if Steve told him that Bucky’d come back, and then left again. There continues to be no guarantee of what comes next, and he feels like guessing or bringing other people into the situation when it’s not absolutely necessary is just asking for disaster. So he doesn’t text Sam.

Instead, he gets up and makes a mug of instant coffee to mix in with the one he just purchased, and he makes himself have faith and wait.

——

The cat is in a dead-end alley a few blocks away where Bucky left it, now laying on top of a dumpster lid instead of the damp cardboard box that Bucky put her down in. She meows when she sees him and he flinches at the noise, crouches behind the dumpster so he can’t be seen from the street. His right hand goes to the knife at his right thigh. He forces himself not to pull it out of its sheath. Reminds himself that it’s just for comfort, that he doesn’t do that, those things, not anymore. Doesn’t kill anymore, not people, not animals. No reason to pull a knife on a stupid cat.

The cat meows again and jumps down to butt her head against Bucky’s hip. She’s dirtier than when Bucky left, he realizes vaguely, but doesn’t see any blood and therefore can’t make himself worry. It’s wet, wet makes dirt, dirt makes dirty cat. Cause and effect. Simple.

“Yeah, I know you’re hungry,” Bucky says when she makes another pitiful whining noise. Is somewhat aware that he doesn’t speak in English. Doesn’t have the energy or will to correct it, isn’t speaking to anyone but the stupid almost-feral cat anyways. Stupid stray that’s taken a liking to him. “Shut up.” The cat meows and lays down, head rested against Bucky’s side, and Bucky lets go of the knife handle to pet the cat, hears and feels her start to purr after a few minutes. Solid and real.

Not much else is. His brain feels fucking scrambled, the smell of rain on concrete mixed in with the dumpster-stench is grinding into his skull, the interaction with Steve skewering his thoughts and his reflexes. But the cat is real and there was never a fucking cat when he was in the cell or the chair or the ice, so he lets the alley be real. For a little while, at least. He shifts, leans over and rests his arms on his knees and his head on his arms, doesn’t close his eyes but lets himself relax, for whatever value of relax he ever can. Mostly lets his vision go a little...unfocused, watches everything a little less intently, stares at the wet cement under his body for as long as he can stand to.

Which turns out to be impressively long. The wet pavement smell isn’t as drilling when he’s above ground as opposed to in an endless subway tunnel and the area seems to be more or less quiet and he manages a few hours of rest with the stupid cat tucked into his side and without pulling, even reaching for, a knife or gun. And he fucking hates it, that it’s something to be considered an accomplishment, but he’ll take when he can get.

It’s a little after midday when he lifts himself off the pavement. Taps his chest for the cat to jump up, catches her when she does, lets her squirm around until she’s in his sweatshirt with her claws digging into his shirt back and her head poking out over his shoulder.

Stupid stray cat.

He doesn’t need the little piece of paper where Steve wrote his address. Has known the address for weeks, maybe a month, ever since he started trailing Steve during his day-to-day, because Steve is either completely obtuse about how easy he is to follow, or he makes it deliberately easy and has never indicated such. He’s not quite sure which one it is, maybe both. Either way: he keeps his hood up, keeps his eyes down, uses back alleys until he gets to Steve’s building. Waits in the shadows unnoticed until someone leaves, catches the front door before it closes and locks, makes his way up to Steve’s floor. Takes the stairs. Apartment 601, cleanly engraved on a little plaque. Raises his hand to knock and doesn't.

He realizes his heart rate has sped up, breathing too fast but not dangerously so, still silent and unnoticeable. Nudges the cat’s head back and shifts his hood to obstruct it from sight, and knocks. Once, barely audible.

The door opens nearly immediately.

“Hi, Bucky,” Steve says. Bucky thinks he might be smiling, a little. It looks–he doesn’t know. “Here, come on in.” He steps aside and holds the door open with his foot. The cat in Bucky’s sweatshirt sniffs a little and pokes her head out from where Bucky has her hidden, and then Steve definitely smiles. It’s soft, maybe a little sad; he still doesn’t recognize emotions well except for anger and fear. Hasn’t dealt with much else. Steve’s smile fades until he just looks calm, waiting. Not expectant, really, just waiting.

He doesn’t think before he does it. Steps inside, walks until he’s in the main room, turns his back to the wall, till he can see Steve and kitchen and interior hallway from where he is. Watches Steve close the door, doesn’t lock it, crosses the room, sits on the couch. Looks at Bucky.

His breathing is still silent but nearing dangerous, heart rate is too fast. His left hand finds the knife handle at his hip. His right hand reaches up to let the cat sniff and pet her head.

“It’s nice to see you again,” Steve says. It seems genuine, for as much as Bucky can tell. He doesn’t respond, doesn’t want to, and Steve keeps talking when he realizes that. “You have a cat.” The animal in mention squirms a little in Bucky’s sweatshirt, worms her way out through the neck and lands on the floor. Bucky tenses and picks her back up, doesn’t try to put her back in his jacket—there’s no need to now, anyways—and nods a little in response to Steve. “He’s pretty,” Steve says, “what’s his name?”

“She. Girl cat,” Bucky says, and fuck, his throat _burns_ at the effort it takes to put the words together, and even worse when he tries to swallow afterwards.

“She have a name?” Steve asks again. Bucky tenses, watching Steve warily. His grip tightens on the cat in his arms and he ignores her mewling about it. “It’s okay, I was just asking. You don’t have to tell me, that’s okay.” He still seems to be telling the truth, more or less, but Bucky isn’t–he isn’t hiding anything, isn’t trying to deceive or lie to Steve, doesn’t want him to get the wrong idea. He swallows again and shakes his head and presses himself back into the wall.

“No. No name.”

“Gotcha,” Steve says with a smile. Bucky frowns. The word sounds wrong, coming out of his mouth, but Bucky doesn’t know why. Can’t identify it.

Nothing new.

“Hey, Bucky?” and Bucky remembers to look at him, _look when you’re being spoken to, you respond when I ask you a question do you understand, don’t speak out of line or you’ll get what’s coming to you, I will not stand for your insubordination_ –

“Hey,” Steve says, voice gentle, and Bucky doesn’t remember when he crouched down. The knife is in his hand now, cat is on the floor to the right of him, his left hand is only steady because the metal can’t shake. Right hand trembles like a leaf in a winter storm.

Steve hasn’t moved off the couch. Has angled his body to face Bucky’s but nothing more.

“Hey, you don’t have to make yourself look at me, that’s alright. You don’t trust me and I don’t blame you, I’m not angry. You’re not in any trouble. No one is going to hurt you, I’m the only one here and I’m not going to hurt you. You haven’t done anything wrong.” Bucky glances over to Steve and looks back down. He closes the knife-blade without looking, muscle memory, or the equivalent for an arm made of fucking metal and screws and plates, no actual muscle. Leaves his finger on the release but doesn’t think he’ll need it. “It’s okay if you don’t believe it yet,” Steve keeps on saying, “but I want you to know it.”

“I know you.”

“…Yeah, Buck?”

“I don’t–I don’t remember, but I know you were there. With the girl, on the highway, and you called me that. And on the deck when you–we–there was water?”

“Yeah,” Steve says again. “The river. You pulled me out.”

“You were going to drown. And die, and–” He tenses back up again, grips the knife tighter, picks the cat back up and stands again. Watches Steve, waiting, ready to fight, or maybe run, because he doesn’t want another fight with this man. Steve watches him back, but it doesn’t seem like he’s going to approach. And then Steve speaks on an entirely different subject.

“Are you thirsty? Or hungry? Your throat sounds like it hurts, and, well, I don’t have much food right now, actually, because I was just making a grocery list,” and he holds up a piece of paper for the second time that day, “I don’t know what you like to eat but I have a Gatorade in the fridge that I’ll go get and you can write things down on the list if you want and I can go shopping and I’ll show you around after. If you want, I mean, you–”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Bucky says, and thinks he means it. Steve smiles, and Bucky tries to back up, only to hit the wall again. Smiles don’t mean anything good, ever, and then he realizes he cut Steve off again.

“I know,” Steve says, even though that doesn’t make sense, he shouldn’t know, there’s no way he knows, Bucky doesn’t know, not really, thinks he means it but doesn’t know if he can keep to it. Just needed Steve to stop talking so nervously. “I know you’re not here to hurt me. It’s just nice that you’re here at all. I’m happy you are.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll go get you something to drink, just in the kitchen, you’ll be able to see me. Write down anything you want.” Bucky tenses when Steve gets up, but he stays true to his word and only goes into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator and takes out a bottle. “Hey,” he says, and Bucky tries to make eye contact again; fails again. “You didn’t like me getting too close to you earlier—that’s okay, I promise, I’m not angry at you for it—do you want me to roll it over to you? Would that work?” Bucky nods. Steve crouches slowly, and Bucky might feel patronized if he weren’t so tense and on edge, but the knife is still in his left hand and he still doesn’t trust himself not to use it. The bottle rolls towards him. He puts the cat back down and nudges her behind himself with his foot, then picks up the bottle. He doesn’t open it but puts it in his sweatshirt pocket instead. Steve looks at the grocery store list and hesitates. “I need a jacket, so I’ll be right back, my bedroom is just down that hallway.”

Bucky nods, slowly, and Steve exits. He crouches near the coffee table where Steve left the list and picks up the pencil, writes the name of the only food he can think of, and snaps back to where he was before Steve reappears. When he does, he has a new jacket on, and walks over towards Bucky, careful again. He holds his hands out, palms open, low by his waist. Display of harmlessness, non-threatening, behavior Bucky knows how to read, isn’t sure whether to believe. “Gonna get the list, nothing else.” He picks it up, reads the one item Bucky’s added, and smiles a little. “Got it. You can stay, but I’m not keeping you here. Door’s unlocked, you can leave if you want to, okay?”

“Okay.” Steve tucks the list into his pants pocket.

“Does your cat need anything?”

He shakes his head.

“Okay. I’ll be back in an hour.” Bucky is thankful when Steve doesn’t say _okay?_ again, because his voice is giving out and his throat burns like hell and he doesn’t know if any of this is okay, really. And then Steve turns and leaves and doesn’t lock the door behind him.

After a few minutes when Steve hasn’t returned and no one else has come out of any of the other rooms, Bucky relaxes slightly. He sits down again on the floor, in the same spot he’s been at since he got there. The cat meows and butts her head against his leg. Bucky scratches her behind the ears to calm her down, at least enough for her to curl up on his legs and purr, the noise rattling around in her chest. He takes a sip of the sports drink Steve gave him. It tastes…strange, is the only way he can describe it, but it helps with the thirst, and he doesn’t think he’s going to throw up after a few sips. Is surprised by that, because he hasn’t eaten very much besides bread and water for however long now. He hasn’t tracked days.

When the cat gets off his lap to stretch and jump onto the back of the couch, Bucky drags himself off the floor. He trades the knife in hand for the military pistol tucked into his waistband; he prefers knives over guns but doesn’t want a knife fight, and the APX works as well as anything.

The first room is Steve’s. It’s clean but lived in: the sheets are wrinkled, the hamper is halfway full with what he presumes are last night’s pajamas on the floor next to it, there are photos on the dresser, the sliding closet door is slightly open. All indicative of human life. Definitely has a color palette, mostly has cohesive decorations, is well put together for someone without a designer. Presumably has some money but doesn’t spend it outlandishly, spending habits most likely carried over from growing up during the Depression.

The room next to it is a guest room. Smaller bed, more cohesive colors, tidy. Unlived in. Nothing significant about it. He notes the fire escape outside the window and moves on. The bathroom next to it is equally unremarkable. Clean but in use, nothing of alarm in the medicine cabinet, nothing else to take inventory of.

He settles back down in the living room and drinks more of the Gatorade. The cat comes back and curls up while he leans forward, places the gun on the floor, and assumes the same position as in the alley.

He hates waiting without knowing what’s to come, but there’s not much else to do until Steve gets back.

——

“Hello?” Sam answers on the second ring.

“Sam, hi,” Steve says, and then realizes that he has no clue of what to say next. “So we’ve got a situation.”

“…Alright, Rogers,” comes the reply. “I’m gonna need more than that to work with.”

“It’s a long story, right, and I’m at the grocery story right now, but–you know how you said if I kept a routine, stayed predictable, you thought there was a chance of him coming back on his own?”

“Oh, shit.” Sam’s voice is a little breathy, and Steve honestly can’t blame him. “Yeah. I take it he did.”

“This morning. Came up to me at Starbucks so I gave him my address and said he could come by if he wanted, and he did. Showed up maybe an hour ago?”

“Shit,” Sam repeats. “Wow. Okay, so what’s he like? What’re we working with here?”

“Scared,” he answers, because it’s the first thing that comes to mind. “Pretty confused, I think, he doesn’t seem to remember much. Hated me getting close to him–”

“How so?” Sam asks, cutting him off.

“He didn’t get violent, if that’s what you’re asking.” Which is not technically a lie. The knife that was clutched in Bucky’s hand for the majority of the time was worrying, but it seemed like more of a comfort object for Bucky than a weapon he intended to use. “He’s just twitchy, pretty paranoid, doesn’t trust anything. Which I _get_ , you know? I mean, I don’t, but I think if anyone has a right to be twitchy and paranoid and distrustful–”

“It’s him,” Sam finishes. “Right. What else?”

“Uh.” Steve wracks his brain, trying to figure out where to even start. “Scared, confused, pretty clearly hates both eye contact and talking, plus his voice sounded _ruined_. He seemed interested when I offered to get him food. I just let him write down what he wanted, because again, the talking thing. I’m pretty sure it’s in Russian cursive, which leaves me as lost as before, but…”

“The internet is your friend, Steve,” Sam says, so drawling that Steve laughs despite the severity of everything at the moment. “Seriously. Google translate.”

“Right,” Steve repeats, “internet. On it.“ And then, all joking aside, “I don’t think he knows his name, which I don’t even _want_ to start thinking about, but he said he knew that was what I called him on the bridge. I kept using it, talking to him, but he seems pretty intent on the whole ‘don’t speak unless spoken to’ basis, and he still won’t really speak even if I do speak to him first. Just nods or shakes his head, but that works fine, so–oh, he has a cat, which–”

“Woah, woah,” Sam says, cutting Steve off entirely, “hold up. Repeat that.”

“Yeah. He’s got a cat. Little white thing, pretty dirty from the rain. And he’s really protective of it, I think, ‘cause he seemed way more invested in her safety than his own. I think he's been taking care of her more than he is himself.” Sam lets out a whistle.

“So let me get this straight,” he says. “He shows up, doesn’t know his past or who he is, is scared of damn near everything, and has a damn cat? Steve, we didn’t factor a cat into any hypothetical scenarios.” That makes Steve chuckle again.

“Yeah, I know. He said he didn’t need anything for the cat, but I’m going to get a litter box and litter and cat food while I’m here because…I don’t know, really, feels like the right thing to do? I’ll need it if he sticks around and if not, then maybe it’ll let him know that it’s safe to keep coming back, or whatever.”

“Smart move,” Sam says, and then switches into what Steve recognizes as his counselor voice. “So, word of advice here. Get rid of the idea of normalcy. All we know about him for the past seventy-odd years is what Natasha gave you, which effectively? Not much to go on. So let him guide you. I wouldn’t push him, he isn’t anywhere near trusting you enough yet for that to go over well. Let him move around how he wants–”

“Honestly,” Steve interrupts. “Half the reason I left so quickly after he showed up was to let him poke around the place.”

“Hypervigilance is gonna be a bitch and a half. Unfortunate but unsurprising. I’d say just let him do what he wants—and I’m not talking about you on that damn helicarrier, Mr. Go-Ahead-And-Kill-Me—but he’s gotta relearn how to make decisions, be a person, you feel me? Give him options and try not to question what he chooses. No bias, you know, gotta show him that it’s safe to _have_ opinions and preferences and all that shit, even if you think that it’s weird sometimes. And don’t say you won’t, because trauma changes a person, and I bet your ass he’s going to have some behaviors that you think are weird; I think I’d be more worried if you didn’t. Short of him hurting you or himself, let him do what he wants.

“But aside from that? It’s a waiting game, still. Not what you want to hear, I know, but true. And I have the whole start of PTSD recovery spiel if that’s what you do want to hear, but I don’t think that’ll start to touch what we’re dealing with.”

“Right,” Steve says, and looks down at his grocery list and now-full cart. “All makes sense, doesn’t mean I have to like it. But thanks, Sam, really. And I’ve gotta go, I’m gonna figure out whatever it was he wrote and then head home.”

“Good plan,” Sam affirms again. “I’ll let you go decode Cyrillic, but Steve?”

“Hm?”

“He came back to you. You couldn’t find him, SHIELD couldn’t, and he decided to come back to you. Don’t discount that.”

“I know,” Steve says, not quite sure what Sam is saying. He promised to be back in an hour, though, and he’s nearing the upper limit of his time frame. “I’ll text you with anything new.”

“Gotcha,” Sam says. “Bye, Steve. You better keep me updated.”

“I will,” he promises. “Talk to you soon,” and he hangs up after another goodbye. He puts his phone away, then remembers that he needs it to look up whatever Bucky wrote down. He spends a few minutes fiddling around with the translation app, trying to figure it out, and then trying to get it to interpret Bucky’s scrawl in something that’s not gibberish. He thinks, or maybe hopes, that Bucky’s handwriting hasn’t changed all that much from what he remembers.

On the fourth try, the app tells him that Bucky wrote ‘piroshki’ and automatically pulls up a little box with the definition for it. It doesn’t take him long to figure out that the supermarket doesn’t have them, so he checks out and pulls up the nearest Russian bakery which is, thankfully, not too far away.

The wonders of New York.

There’s more options than he knows what to do with, and he ends up purchasing six. Three baked, three fried, each a different flavor, because he has no idea what Bucky’s preference would be. He hands the money over and leaves a sizable tip and smiles to the girl working the register when she thanks him.

Bucky is in the same place Steve left him when he returns, a little over an hour later as promised. He jerks upright when Steve opens the door and reaches to his hip for what Steve thinks must be another knife. Steve’s also pretty sure his head hits the wall, and hard, but Bucky doesn’t react to it.

“Hi, Bucky,” he says, hoping to diffuse Bucky’s fear as quickly as he can. “Sorry it took me a little longer than I expected, but I got you the piroshki. They had a lot of types and I didn’t know what you liked best, so,” he shrugs apologetically and sets the two grocery bags down. “I kind of got a lot. I wasn’t sure what your cat would eat, so I got her food too.” Bucky doesn’t respond, which Steve isn’t too surprised by, so he keeps talking. “I’ll put this stuff away and then how about I show you around? Not much to see, pretty small apartment, but I oughta show you what there is.”

He unloads the groceries and grabs a plate, then looks at the food he has on the counter in front of him. “Do you want baked or fried? They had both and I didn’t know which ones were better so I got both.” Bucky frowns a little, still watching Steve intently. “It’s your choice,” he says, in case Bucky needs the reminder. “There's no wrong answer, I just don’t want you to be hungry.” Bucky’s eyes don’t move off him and his right hand goes to pet the cat on the floor next to him. Steve doesn’t push any further, just waits.

And very hesitantly, Bucky says, “baked.” Steve smiles a little and doesn’t bother trying to hide it, even though he’s sure Bucky sees it. He sets one of the baked piroshkis onto a plate and makes his way into the living room. He sits down at the same spot on the couch as before.

“I’m going to put the plate down on the table,” he says, and does so. “It’s all yours.” Bucky keeps glancing between Steve and the plate, and Steve doesn’t miss the way Bucky visible tenses when Steve gets closer. He also doesn’t miss that Bucky pulls the cat closer to him. “Bucky,” he says gently, and then realizes as he starts to speak that he doesn’t know how to say what he wants to. “I won’t touch your cat if you don’t want me to, Buck,” is what he ends up saying. “It’s okay. I won’t touch her and I won’t touch you, promise, not until you say it’s okay.” He realizes after he says it that maybe ‘until’ was a poor choice of words, maybe he should’ve gone with ‘unless’ instead, but Bucky doesn’t seem upset by it. Bucky doesn’t seem to have taken it in at all, if Steve is being honest with himself.

“Okay,” Bucky says quietly. “I’m sorry.” The second sentence is even quieter, barely audible, and Bucky looks down as if he’s ashamed.

In that moment, Steve finds himself thankful that Bucky isn’t looking at him, because he doesn’t think he does a very good job at hiding his facial expressions. He’s pretty sure that Bucky would see the cross between anger and sorrow he feels at the fact that Bucky thinks he needs to apologize, and is certain that Bucky would think that anger-slash-sorrow is directed at him. Not at the people that spent seven decades torturing him until he was terrified of being touched and then making him feel the need to apologize for that fear.

Steve tries to dodge those thoughts. They’re unimportant right now.

“That’s alright,” he tells Bucky. Carefully keeps his voice steady and calm, because Bucky doesn’t deserve to be any more scared. He doesn’t deserve to be as scared as he already is, and Steve resolutely refuses to add to that, at least as much as he can. “I’m not angry. Just want you to know.” And because he thinks that Bucky probably doesn’t want to dwell on the subject, he changes it. “Your voice sounds a little better. Are you still thirsty?” Bucky shakes his head. Steve doesn’t miss the way his eyes glance over to the plate on the table. “That’s good. I’ll give you some space to let you eat, then how about I show you around the place?” He doesn’t think Bucky needs him hovering. He doubts Bucky would move to take the food with him right there.

“Okay,” Bucky says. It seems to be his response to most questions, but he seems to mean it. More or less. Steve doesn’t smile—he wants to, but is pretty sure that Bucky would interpret it wrong. Doesn’t know how he would interpret it, but doubts it would be as encouragement or kindness. So Steve gets up and goes into his room instead.

He pulls out his phone and sends a quick text to Sam with his most recent realization. _He’s bad at answering questions. Says ok like it’s his default response no matter what I ask and he seems scared to nod/shake his head. Not sure why but not pushing._

Then he realizes that he probably should be in touch with other people. Maria Hill is the first that comes to mind, having taken over what’s left of SHIELD in Fury’s absence, and then Stark. The first email is overly formal and probably sounds clipped, which he supposes it is, but he needs to make his stance clear. _Hi_ , it reads. _James Barnes arrived at my apartment today a little after noon. He’s safe here and isn't a threat to me or himself or anyone else. He’s staying here for as long as he chooses and anyone trying to take him in, anywhere, is going to end badly._ The email itself ends on a brief note and he sends it before he can contemplate whether or not he should be giving Hill ultimatums. The text to Stark just reads _He showed up, is ok-ish, nowhere near ok enough for you to look at his arm. Thought you should know anyways._

Then he browses the internet aimlessly until he hears a soft shuffling behind him and turns to see Bucky. The cat is weaving between his ankles and Bucky still looks scared, but maybe a little less so than before.

“Hey,” Steve says for what feels like the hundredth time that day because he doesn’t know how else to start speaking without feeling like he’s ordering Bucky around or otherwise demanding things of him. “Let me give you the tour, yeah?” Bucky nods, and Steve gestures around him. “Main bedroom,” he says. “I don’t have much ‘cause I haven’t been here very long and, well, I don’t have that much in general. Old habits die hard, and all that. Come on, I can get you set up in the other bedroom.”

He’s pretty sure that Bucky already poked around the place while he was grocery shopping and his brief tour does nothing to indicate the opposite. Bucky follows behind him, listens to what Steve’s aware is still rambling but can’t find it in himself to control, and is otherwise silent and minimally responsive. The cat follows the whole time, winding around and between Bucky’s legs when she can and walking next to him when she can’t, and Steve wonders if she’s the first friendly contact that Bucky has had in decades. He feels sick at the thought, but knows that he’s more likely correct than not.

When Steve offers him clean clothes and a shower, Bucky nods and looks almost eager, or like someone who would be eager if they knew how. It’s also the closest that Bucky’s allowed him to get so far, when Steve hands him clean clothes that he hopes will fit and a towel. Bucky looks confused when Steve shows him how to turn on the shower.

“I’ll just be in the living room, you can take your time. There’s shampoo and conditioner and soap, use what you want to.” Bucky’s right hand unmistakably twitches towards his hip, and Steve frowns. “What’s wrong?” he asks, not really expecting an answer. “You don’t have to shower if you don’t want to, but it seemed like you might.” When Bucky still doesn’t respond, Steve tries to think of what else could be the issue. “Water’s warm,” he says, and holds a hand under it to demonstrate. It doesn’t seem to help persuade Bucky at all. “How about the bath, you can take a bath instead.”

“Okay,” Bucky agrees quickly. Steve doesn’t question why, remembering Sam’s advice about opinions and preferences and the ability to have them. Instead, he changes the faucet and repeats, “I’ll be in the living room,” and leaves Bucky to his devices.

——

He feels better with the bath. Watches dirt and blood and grease and grime wash down the drain while the stupid cat lays on the toilet lid. He scrubs the soap into his hair mechanically and washes it out again and repeats it until the water runs clean. He towels off and pulls on the clothes Steve gave him. They’re soft and warm and a little too big on him, a far cry from what he’s used to wearing, but comfortable. Maybe something he could get used to if he let himself.

He looks at himself in the mirror then thinks about Steve in the living room. There’s shaving cream on the countertop and he thinks about Steve saying _use what you want to_ , but Steve hasn’t included shaving cream in his list. He decides it’s safer not to and lathers soap up instead, rubs it into his weeks’ worth of stubble the same way he did with the soap and his hair, and does his best to shave using one of his throwing knives.

He cuts himself six times before he gives up.

Steve looks up when he walks in. “You look better,” is the first thing he says in all blunt honesty. “How’s it feel?”

“…Good,” Bucky decides on, because he thinks it’s what’s Steve wants to hear and because it definitely didn’t feel _bad._

“Good,” Steve repeats, sounding happy about it. Bucky takes another careful step forward and the light must catch him differently, because only then does Steve ask, “Do you want to shave?”

“Okay.” His voice cracks in the middle and he flinches back and ignores both.

“Okay,” Steve agrees easily. “Hold on, I know I’ve got a disposable razor somewhere, but I can get you a proper one tomorrow. Or–actually, let me just change the blades on mine, okay? That’ll be better, I think you’ll like that more.”

Bucky nods, doesn’t know what to think. Doesn’t even know why he’s so intent on shaving, just knows he’s spent months trying to do it with the same knife he just used and has always cut himself, ended up scratching at and through skin with the metal of his left hand, been desperate to get it off.

Steve gives him a wide berth when he walks past. Bucky tenses when he remembers the cat is still in the bathroom. Remembers Steve’s promise not to touch her and tries to believe it. Steve hands him the razor a moment later and tells him that there’s shaving cream on the sink.

He shaves quickly and doesn’t nick himself this time, washes the razor off when he’s done. Sets it down and picks up the cat and a washcloth to clean the dirt she’s gotten on herself and ignores the pitiful mewling when he does so.

“You’re not hurt, you’re dramatic,” he mutters in Russian. “Shut up.” She doesn’t, but lets him clean her without more fuss than the mewling and a few swats. He hesitates when he’s done, trying to decide what to do next. Steve is still sitting in the living room and it’d be easy enough to move silently, slip out through the window, down the fire escape. Doesn’t have to stay, wouldn’t have to come back.

Doesn’t have to but can.

He thinks he wants to.

He picks up the cat and finds Steve in the living room reading. He looks up at Bucky and smiles a little, facial expressions still wholly genuine.

“Feel better?” Bucky nods. “That’s good,” and he’s too fucking earnest about it. “You're a little cut up, let me get you some bandaids, okay?”

“‘S fine,” Bucky responds, because it is. “Shallow cuts. Doesn’t matter.”

“I won’t make you use them, but I’m going to get them for you.” It’s not a question. He wants protest but knows better, lets Steve get up and put them down on the coffee table, same way he did with the food before. Hates that Steve’s learned that so quickly, hates even more than it helps, quells the anxiety rising in his chest. And then, “Hey.” Voice still gentle, not ordering or commanding, just getting his attention. “I’m going to go to bed,” Steve says, and Bucky frowns. It’s dark out but he isn’t sure of the time, but it feels too early for Steve to be going to bed. Maybe he’s lying, setting a trap, tricking Bucky into thinking it’s safe, maybe he shouldn’t want to stay, should have left after the bath and not come back–

And then Steve is sitting on the floor in front of him. Not close, not angry or violent or even expectant, nothing that could possibly make any fucking sense. It only confuses him more.

(Although, he thinks bitterly, at this point, what the fuck _doesn’t?_ )

“I want you to know,” Steve is saying, and Bucky can’t focus, is crawling up his own spine for no discernible reason, “that there’s nothing you could do wrong. I know you’re scared, I know, and you don’t trust me, and that’s okay. I don’t blame you. But you’re safe here. There’s no wrong move.”

He’s holding his knife again, the matte black combat knife he keeps at his right hip, toying with it. It’s comforting–fucked up, maybe, but comforting. And Steve is on the same level as him now and Steve is watching him and waiting and Bucky flinches and it takes the cat meowing unhappily for him to realize that he’s started to pull at her fur.

“I don’t– it’s not– I don’t _know_ ,” he forces out, not even knowing what it is he doesn’t know.

“It’s okay,” Steve says, and their eyes meet briefly. For a fraction of a second before Bucky has to look away. “You don’t have to. Just know that you’re safe here.” He nods. It’s stiff and probably not believable but he doesn’t know what his other options are. “Are you going to be okay, if I go to bed?”

He nods again, forces himself to say “yes,” and Steve’s face relaxes a little, hearing the verbal confirmation. Steve gets up. Bucky watches but doesn’t mirror him, doesn’t feel like he has to. Could defend himself but doesn’t think he’ll need to. And Steve doesn’t approach him, just locks the deadbolt on the door.

“You can leave, if you want, I just–”

“I know,” Bucky says stiffly, because a deadbolt isn’t going to stop him from leaving and Steve would be stupid not to lock his apartment before going to bed. “You don’t have to–I know.” Steve shrugs.

“‘Kay. Just wanted you to know that I’m not keeping you here. I can’t do that, and even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, but the cat meows, saving from having to say anything. Steve smiles and stands up.

“Kitchen is all yours if you’re still hungry, and there’s food for your cat on the counter.” And when he says, “I’ll see you in the morning?” Bucky’s pretty sure he sounds hopeful.

So he nods, and Steve disappears down the hallway and into his bedroom.

He feeds the cat when she starts meowing and pawing at him; not from the cat food tin that’s on the kitchen counter but from the piroshki that’s still on the coffee table. He ate as much of the bread as he could stomach while Steve was in his bedroom and he lets the cat nibble at the meat (beef, he’s pretty sure) inside. Talks to her quietly in Russian and gets a few cat noises in response, until she’s done whining for food and curls up to go to sleep.

He doesn’t move her when he gets up. In any other instance he would and he still doesn’t trust Steve, doesn’t trust being in the apartment, but is confident that there’s no one else in there aside from the two of them. Plus the stray cat he’s somehow ended up with.

He finds himself in Steve’s bedroom and is unsure what led him there.

Steve is asleep. Breathing shallow and steady, one arm under his pillow and the other crooked up against himself on top of the comforter. Bucky watches from near the doorway before he makes his way towards the armchair in the corner and sits down on the floor. He shifts, positions his left arm on the arm of the chair to keep the weight off of it, and feels the pain in his back release just slightly. Situates himself in the corner as comfortably as he can and relaxes as much as he can, doesn’t close his eyes but allows himself to rest.

Stays that way for a few hours until Steve stirs and speaks.

“Bucky, ‘s that you?” His voice is muffled and a little slurred, but not angry or threatening or anything else it could be, except maybe confused. Bucky nods and then realizes he doesn’t know if Steve’s eyesight is as good as his, and answers out loud. “Y’okay? Need anything?” Bucky frowns, unsure of how to answer, and then settles on answering each question individually

“Okay. No.”

“You tired? You can sleep in here or the other bedroom or the couch ‘f you want.”

“No.”

“Alright,” Steve says through a yawn and shifts his pillow. “‘S nice to have you here.”

Bucky doesn’t respond to that, and Steve goes back to sleep, his breathing evening out again after a few minutes.

He gets off the floor and returns to the living room when Steve starts to stir again. Daylight is starting to seep in through the blinds and he moves the ottoman after some heavy contemplation, then sits back down on the floor and rests his arm on it.

Steve appears a few minutes later, hair rumpled and face sleep-laden. Asks if Bucky wants to come with him to the Starbucks and doesn’t push when Bucky shakes his head, leaves him alone with the cat again, and returns in an hour or so.

Time slips again, after Steve comes back. He loses track, can’t hang on, can’t fucking cling to what he should know is real, is the present.

The cat yowls unhappily at him when it happens, then slinks off to lay under the couch. He holds a gun at his side with no intent to use it. Steve doesn’t approach him and doesn’t reach down to touch the cat even though she’s laying near him; Bucky thinks Steve speaks at times but doesn’t know what he says, knows that everything goes without a response. Steve sets another piroshki down on the coffee table and disappears into his bedroom. Bucky picks at the bread, gives the filling to the cat, and registers in the back of his mind that it’s been a full twenty-four hours since he’s shown up.


	2. Chapter 2

The apartment feels like a cage and he feels like he’s drowning. As far as metaphors go, they’re not bad ones. He knows he nearly drowned before, suffocated in water, thrashed and fought and held his breath until he couldn’t anymore and gave up, inhaled water into his lungs and choked and choked until he either passed out or was pulled out. Knows he spent most of his time awake in a cage, small, too small to do anything but stand in.

Memories are still sparse. He has a few from before the war, a few from during, next to none from after he fell. He’s guided more by instinct than remembrance and it hasn’t failed him in the past day. Steve has yet to get angry or violent or any of the things he can be—should be—and instead is calm and patient and doesn’t push, doesn’t ask anything of Bucky.

Steve is in his bedroom and there is a newspaper on the kitchen counter and scotch tape in a side table drawer. He taps his chest for the cat to jump, her claws catching on his (Steve’s, not his) sweatshirt and clinging to him. He moves silently into the second bedroom.

It doesn’t take long to tape the newspaper over the window. It filters the light and makes it hard to see in without being right on the fire escape, something that's next to impossible to have happen without him noticing first. Steve is watching a video on the laptop in his own bedroom, Bucky can hear the audio, but doesn’t make himself concentrate enough to parse out the words. He lays down on the bed to take some weight off of his arm and lets the cat settle next to his right side, her chin on his hip. There’s a pistol lying next to him and he still doesn’t think he’ll use it.

Day turns to night.

Time slips.

Steve appears at one point and knocks lightly on the doorframe to ask if Bucky's hungry. Bucky shrugs so Steve brings a plate to his bedroom, an American dish that Bucky knows he won’t be able to eat without vomiting up.

A little later when it’s fully dark again, Steve asks if he wants to take a bath and shave again. He nods because he remembers Steve being pleased by that the night before, and lets Steve get close enough to hand him another set of clothes: socks, underwear, thick sweatpants, a shirt. He spends less time in the bathroom than the night before because he doesn’t think he can be in there for longer without breaking something, part of the house or himself.

(Wouldn’t be the first time that he’d done the latter. Would be fucking far from the first time, he doesn’t remember but he knows that it happened, that he’d do what Pierce said in a desperate attempt to avoid experiencing the worst further down the line. Would break himself just for Pierce to watch and then leave wordlessly.)

He sits in the second bedroom again afterwards, on the bed with his back against the wall. Eyes trained down. Steve goes to bed and he moves to sit in Steve’s bedroom once he’s certain Steve is asleep.

Day turns to night turns to day, and nothing makes any fucking sense.

——

There’s a lot more words to describe things now than there used to be. He doesn’t know how he would have previously described it–shellshock, probably, if Bucky’s issues were more related to the war itself than the decades afterwards. But it’s not called shellshock anymore, it’s post-traumatic stress disorder (which he knew about before Sam emailed him with the psychology journals on it the night that Bucky came back), and if there’s anything to cause it, decades of abuse and torture and being made into a killing machine fit the bill.

He doesn’t know what he would’ve called the psychosis. And that’s what he’s pretty sure it is, because Bucky’s grasp on the world seems rocky at best. He looks at Steve like he doesn’t know who he is—who either of them are—and moves about the apartment like it’s something a lot more sinister than a small Brooklyn condo. Most of the questions Steve asks seem to just confuse Bucky even more and Steve hopes he’s not making an already awful scenario even worse, especially when Bucky doesn’t respond to any of them. Just looks up at him with an indecipherable expression and does what Steve’s pretty sure isn’t Bucky’s actual reaction, but what he thinks Steve wants from him.

Steve hears him talk a few times and is never sure whether it’s to himself or the cat or someone that’s not there. He doesn’t know if Bucky’s probable psychosis includes hallucinations or delusions (and Sam explained the difference in the same email thread as with the PTSD journals, but he still doesn’t quite _get_ it), but he wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Just hopes it doesn’t, because God knows that’s one more thing that Bucky doesn’t deserve to deal with.

Doesn’t deserve to deal with any of this.

So there’s PTSD and psychosis and probably a lot else even if Steve doesn’t know what they’re called. And he’s okay with that, honestly, because he thinks the only way to know would involve Bucky seeing a psychiatrist and he knows that option is so far off the table it’s–well, it’s off the table. No question about it.

Ultimately, day two goes smoothly. Not easily or comfortably, but nothing catastrophic happens, and Bucky doesn’t do anything except sit in the living room when Steve is also there and in his bedroom when Steve isn’t. (Steve doesn’t know what Bucky does when he’s out of the house and he isn’t going to ask.) Bucky manages to eat a little and bathes at night and even though both only happen with Steve’s prompting, it’s something.

Bucky turns down accompanying him to Starbucks again (which doesn’t surprise Steve, but he wants to make sure that Bucky knows he has the choice) and shakes his head when Steve offers to bring something back for him. He calls Sam from the Starbucks patio and gets sent straight to voicemail—which makes sense, because it’s after nine am and Sam would’ve started his first session at the VA—and then calls Stark.

“Oh captain, my captain,” he answers, and Steve rolls his eyes more dramatically than needed, given that Tony can’t actually see him. “What is it that can I do for you today?”

“Why do you assume that I’m calling because I need something?” Steve responds.

“Because you only ever call me personally when you need things.” That only irritates Steve, because Tony is right and Steve hates having to admit that. “You just show up at the tower when you’re looking to waste time.” Luckily, Steve doesn’t have to admit anything because Stark barrels ahead with, “How’s it going with the new roommate? He try to kill you in your sleep?” It’s light enough that Steve can tell it’s a joke, but still feels the impulse to jump to defend Bucky.

“No,” he says. “He watched me sleep, though, both nights, which was–”

“Supremely weird and creepy? Totally not something you want a brainwashed amnesiac ex-assassin doing?”

“Back in my day,” Steve starts, knowing it’ll get a kick out of Tony and not wanting to acknowledge the actual weight of what he said, “they had this thing called finishing school. They made you learn manners. Ever thought of it?”

“You telling me that him watching you sleep didn’t creep you out, at least a little?”

“I–look, if it makes him feel safer then I don’t care.”

“So you _do_ think it’s creepy. Can’t blame you there. So how is–Dum-E, not now.”

“What are you doing?”

“Multitasking. How is he, actually?” Steve hesitates, not sure how to answer. He doesn’t want to divulge as much as he did with Sam the day before, but also knows that he’s not going to get away with lying to Tony. (And, if he’s being honest with himself, that despite all of Tony’s flaws, he’s surprisingly nonjudgmental.)

“He’s–I don’t know. Probably doing impressively well, given everything.” As he says it, he realizes it’s true.

“Anything short of him going on a murder spree that ends with himself is impressive.” Steve sighs, because that’s all there is to do in response to a statement like that. And because, once again, Stark is probably right. “Where’s he been hiding out for three months?”

“No idea.”

“Hm.” Steve expects an elaboration on that, but gets nothing. “So are you going to come over here or are we going to spend all day talking on the phone about things that you’re too smart to talk about in public and too noble to talk about in front of him?”

“You know, Stark–” Steve says.

“You sound like my mother. What should I get for lunch? I feel like Thai food, do you like Thai food?” Steve sighs again.

“Sure,” he says, “Thai’s fine.” Tony starts to respond and then gets distracted talking to what Steve presumes is a robot, so he hangs up without bothering to say goodbye. There’s no harm in lunch.

It turns out that lunch is not exclusively the two of them. Lunch also includes Banner and Jane Foster, who’s apparently taken a break from Asgard to collaborate with Bruce on a project far beyond Steve’s understanding, and Tony says that Thor, Natasha, and Clint have all been invited but are unlikely to appear.

Which is fine by Steve. He likes Bruce and Jane, and neither of them are afraid to tell Tony when he’s being ridiculous. But he’s also a bit apprehensive to talk about Bucky in front of either of them with the same level of honesty he would with Stark. (Because maybe against his better judgement, he trusts Stark. Sometimes he even likes him. He’s a good scientist and inventor and person, as much as either of them like to act like he’s not, and he’s also spent his own time in captivity. Steve doesn’t like that, the fact that it happened, but it makes Stark a little more trustworthy with the issue at hand.)

The food is good and the conversation is comfortable and Tony doesn’t drive him up the wall any more than usual. He finds himself pleasantly surprised when he realizes that he hasn’t been worrying about Bucky being at his apartment alone, not because he’s worried about what Bucky could do but because he doesn’t like the idea of leaving him alone again when he’s spent the past seventy years with no friendly faces or allies or anyone who doesn’t want to cause him harm.

Maybe Bucky’s relearning how to exist, how to function, how to be his own person, and Steve isn’t going to leave him to do it alone, not unless Bucky makes him—and _God_ how he hopes that doesn’t happen—but he’s not going to be overbearing. Bucky doesn’t need to be supervised.

He realizes that and then, of course, starts to worry again. He’s half tempted to excuse himself and head home when Stark says something directly addressing him, as opposed to casual conversation with the group.

“Huh?”

“I said, how’s he doing?”

“Oh,” Steve says, and looks at Jane and Bruce. He decides that they’re both trustworthy enough to hear what he has to say; it’s not like Bruce doesn’t have plenty of secrets of his own, and sometimes the way Foster carries herself makes him think the same about her. “How much do you two know?”

“Nothing,” Bruce says. “Tony said he sought you out and is at your apartment, that’s all.”

“Well,” Steve says after thinking. “He’s doing better than he could be.”

“That could mean a lot of things, Steve,” Bruce says.

“He’s scared of everything and wary and pretty confused. We haven’t talked about memories, really, he said he remembered bits from the bridge and the helicarrier, but I think that what he does have of his memories are a complete mess.”

“Well, that's about par for your course.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “I don’t know what he needs and he can’t tell me yet–and I do think it’s ‘can’t’, not ‘won’t’. I think he would but there's something that’s stopping him.” He shrugs. “I just want him to be okay.”

“Think of it like this,” Bruce says. “And I know it’ll sound cold and impersonal and bad, but…he knows how to be a weapon and how to kill people and probably not much else. They didn’t need him to know anything else. So I think that for where he’s at—physically, being back at your apartment, as well as mentally?—frankly, I think that’s a miracle.” Steve shifts a little, uncomfortable. “And, I mean, who am I to say? I don’t know the guy. But given how well he did at staying completely under _everyone’s_ radar, I don’t think he’s going to have resurfaced and not stick around.”

“Guy’s right,” Tony says, speaking up for the first time since asking how Bucky was. “Come on, you’re painfully noble and virtuous and–” He waves a hand. “–all that. It’s no surprise that he wanted to come back to you and he sure didn’t come back to try and kill you again.” Before Steve has time to process that, Tony changes course. “How’s the arm?”

“Uh,” Steve says, not expecting it. “I haven’t asked? He doesn’t use it, it just kind of dangles there, and he tries to have it resting on something when he can.”

“I'll bet you money it’s weighing him down,” Tony says. “Probably completely fucking with his spine and causing a bunch of pain, probably causing a bunch of mental shit too, ‘cause pain like that isn’t good. I might make a mock-up, see what I can do.”

“I meant it,” Steve says, referring back to the text he sent a few days previous. “He’s not going to let you replace his arm. He hates if I get near him, not even _close_ , I’ll be feet away and he’ll start to panic and he _knows_ me.” He doesn’t think about how a lot of the time, it seems more like Bucky doesn’t. “He's not going to let you do that. He doesn’t know you, he doesn’t trust you, he–”

“Steve,” Jane interjects. “He only suggested making a mock-up.” Steve stops and forces himself to take a breath and relax his defenses. Stark doesn’t say anything about Steve’s reaction.

“I could do a better job than a bunch of jerk-off Nazi leftovers did in the fifties. Practice making it beforehand to have it go less fucked-up-ly if he does let me take a look at it ever. I can’t blame him, you know, it’s not like he’d have any memories or instincts, impulses, whatever, that concern the arm that aren’t completely fucking awful.”

“Okay,” Steve says. “Yeah, that’s–yeah.”

He suddenly feels very overwhelmed.

Maybe it’s more obvious than he’d like, because Tony takes his plate and gets more pad thai even though it must be cold by now, and Jane and Bruce both pull out their cell phones.

He should get Bucky one, he thinks. He doesn’t know how familiar Bucky is with modern technology but everyone has one now; he has one, even if he still uses the laptop more than he uses the cell phone. It feels like the right thing to do.

He voices such.

“I’d offer to give you one,” Tony says as he sits back down, “and the offer stands, but if I were you? Just get him a new one, totally untampered with. I don’t think he’d trust anything I gave him.” That makes sense and Steve hadn’t even thought of it.

Damn Tony and his occasional insightfulness.

“What time is it?” Steve asks out of curiosity.

“Almost one-thirty,” Bruce says, “which means I should be getting back to work. Let me know if you need anything, Steve.” Jane stands up with him, and Bruce claps Steve on the shoulder as they exit.

“Are you okay?” Tony asks once they’re alone, and then immediately takes a too-large bite of pad thai. It’s another question that catches Steve entirely off guard.

“Yeah,” he says. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“When I got back from Afghanistan, I couldn’t really…do things on my own. Drank a lot, there was a point where I was staying up for three or four days straight before crashing for a day or so and then doing it all over again, I’d forget to eat or shower. Pepper was handling the whole SI shitstorm I made so Rhodey stuck around a lot and kept me from, well, dying. And then once I started taking care of myself a bit more, enough that I was like,” he waves a hand yet again, “ _functioning_ , Rhodey got really sick. Guy was so intent on nagging me about taking care of myself that he wasn’t doing it for himself at all. Spent six months riding my ass only have it turn around and bite him in his. And I’m thankful for him, but–”

Steve doesn’t know how to respond. Stark’s never shared anything about his time in Afghanistan before and he doesn’t know what to do with the new information.

“What I’m saying is, take care of him, but take care of yourself. Don’t run yourself into the ground, you’re already doing all you can.”

“…Thanks, Tony,” he says, because there’s nothing else to say. The uncharacteristically tender moment leaves him a bit thrown off. “I should probably be going too.”

“Door’s always open,” Tony says. “If you stop by the Apple store over on Fifth in, say, an hour? They’ll have a phone waiting for you, just show ‘em your ID.”

Steve opens his mouth to respond at the same time that JARVIS opens the door. He can tell that Stark is going to be insistent and decides the battle over ‘I can buy a phone myself’ isn’t going to be worth it, so he leaves after a brief goodbye and a hug.

He does end up taking the subway over and picking up the cell phone. Bucky doesn’t say anything about it when he sets it down on the side table in Bucky’s room.

He watches Steve steadily and Steve thinks that he might look a little less scared than he did the previous two days.

“Steve,” Bucky says when Steve is in the doorway to leave. His voice is so quiet that Steve doesn’t think any other person would’ve heard. He turns around.

“Yeah?” he says, being careful to keep his voice even.

“You didn’t speak Russian.” It’s not a question, but Steve answers it anyways.

“No. I know a little, but I don’t speak it.”

“You didn’t. When we were kids.” Steve shakes his head and definitely doesn’t dwell on what it might mean that Bucky is able to say that. “Okay.”

“Of course,” Steve says easily, and then decides to push a little. “Why’d you ask?”

“They took it,” he says, looking confused. “I knew Russian and they made me learn English.”

“Oh,” Steve says. And then, because there’s way too many wrong interpretations of that one word, he says, “Thank you for telling me.”

Bucky looks back down to the comforter, and Steve leaves.

——

He knows how long he can go without sleep. It got tested, over and over and over again. Usually resting is enough, he can close his eyes and let the world drift for a little bit and it doesn’t end catastrophically.

But he’s _tired_.

He’s not sure he remembers how to sleep. He doesn’t think, if he tried, he’d be able to lay down on a bed and close his eyes and do it. The closest thing to sleep he’d had was cryo, and all he’s known since then is resting, dozing. Not quite conscious but not quite unconscious.

Steve is in the living room with him. He’s in the same spot he’s spent most of his time in, wedged next to the ottoman he moved after the first night. He’s reading something on the laptop and Bucky has the cat in his lap, scratching her head with his right hand. His left rests on the ottoman, because it pulls and fucks with his body more than usual if he can’t rest it somewhere.

He’s not sure how late it is. It’s dark out, but it’s November—it gets dark halfway through the afternoon, which helps him none—and Steve hasn’t given him food for dinner yet. So presumably it’s still early, maybe five, but he’s not sure why it matters anyways. Isn’t like he’s had a solid grasp, a proper understanding of the passage of time in God knows how long. And isn’t that just the irony-icing on the irony-cake.

Steve looks at the laptop and he seems relaxed. Bucky still doesn’t trust him, can’t, isn’t capable of it, but Steve is unarmed and has yet to get angry and Bucky could fight him off if he needed to. And probably without even doing permanent damage, could fight him off enough to get out and away without being followed.

“Steve,” he says before he can properly think it through. Steve looks over to him, seemingly startled but calm. Bucky waits.

“Yeah?” Steve responds when Bucky doesn’t. And he figures it’s too late to turn back, and Steve might even say yes.

“Can I use your bathroom?”

Steve’s eyes soften a little and there’s some other expression that’s indecipherable to Bucky. “Of course,” he says, “you don’t have to ask, okay?”

“Okay,” Bucky replies because he knows it’s what Steve wants. Then, because Steve’s initial reaction had been so anticlimactic, he pushes a little bit further, maybe a little further than he should. “Can I take a bath?”

“Sure, Bucky. I–you don’t have to ask for these things. Everything I have is yours too.” Bucky watches him, waiting, and stands once when Steve finally looks back to the laptop. The cat meows indignantly but hops off his lap before he’s properly upright, and she weaves between his legs as she follows him into the bathroom.

He uses the toilet and turns on the bath. The water runs cold and then hot as he adjusts the knobs and nudges the cat off of the bathtub ledge because he knows that her curiosity will get the better of her and he does _not_ have the patience to deal with an unhappy wet cat.

She meows her complaint but moves, hops onto the toilet tank and lays down. He bathes quickly; the water runs clean this time, no blood or dirt to wash away. He’s efficient more than anything else and gets it over as quickly as he can. Steve didn’t give him new clothes this time so he dries himself off enough to be able to pull on the same ones he wore during the rest of the day. He shaves, because Steve bought him a razor and he’s still compelled to rip the facial hair off if he doesn’t. And then he leaves the bathroom before the caged feeling starts really getting to him, grinding into his skull.

Steve’s moving around in the kitchen and looks up when Bucky enters.

“Do you want to eat dinner with me?” Steve asks, which is different from what he’s asked the other two nights. Bucky falters, not knowing how to answer. “I won’t be angry if you don’t want to,” he continues, “your choice, alright? But…” Bucky thinks Steve sounds hopeful but he doesn’t want to sit at the table. He settles down next to the ottoman and ties his hair back using a rubber band, the cat lays next to him again.

“I’m making spaghetti, if you want some.”

“The cat has to eat.”

“Yeah,” Steve says easily, “I got her cat food at the store a few days ago. What else has she been eating?”

“Piroshki.” Bucky says the word in Russian. “I can’t–food is hard.”

“Oh,” Steve says. He’s still calm, stirring the pasta. “Because you don’t like it or because it makes you sick?” The question catches Bucky off guard (although at this point, everything may as well catch him off guard) and he falters.

“Both.”

“You had to be eating before.” Bucky shrugs.

“I eat the bread, she eats the meat,” he says. “I can’t–food is hard. I can’t keep it down. Most of it.”

“Oh,” Steve says again. “Is there anything you do like to eat?” Bucky shakes his head. “Are you hungry?” He shrugs again. “Piroshki or spaghetti, Buck?”

“Spaghetti,” he decides on a whim. Steve smiles and it’s warm, genuine, comforting. Stirs up a sense of nostalgia, not that he can remember what for.

Steve hesitates when he enters the living room, two plates in hand. Bucky tenses and moves his hand off of the cat’s back, holds it out to Steve. Leaves his left arm on the ottoman because he doesn’t trust it, doesn’t trust himself with it.

Steve hands him the plate.

Bucky thinks vaguely that it’s probably the closest he’s allowed Steve to get to him in the past three days and the longest conversation he’s had. He relaxes again slightly when Steve sits down on the couch and the cat stands up in his lap, nosing at his plate.

“Move, stupid,” he says in Russian, pushing her head back, “not for you.” She meows and climbs off of Bucky’s lap to stretch, then wanders over to Steve.

Bucky tenses up again, feels more on edge than he has the entire time he’s been at Steve’s.

“Hi, cat,” Steve says and then looks over to Bucky. His voice gets softer when he says, “Hey, Bucky. It’s okay, she’s just saying hi, I’m still not going to pet her, not if you don’t want me to.” Bucky doesn’t know what to say. “Bucky–” He realizes he’s grinding his teeth, probably too hard for it to be safe. “–there’s a can of cat food on the kitchen counter, you should put it in a bowl because I don’t want her to cut herself on the can, but she’ll be a lot more interested in that than she is in me.”

Bucky stands quickly and follows Steve’s instructions, finds a bowl in the cabinet and sets it down next to where he was sitting before. Steve doesn’t move from his chair and the cat trots back over happily and Bucky, once again, marginally relaxes.

Steve goes back to eating as if that entire thing had been normal.

He’s still tense, on edge, but sits down again and mirrors Steve. The spaghetti is good and he’s able to eat it, the first full meal he’s had in…he doesn’t know. Years, decades, _fuck_.

He doesn’t know.

Steve doesn’t try to make conversation. He’s thankful, doesn’t think he could respond if Steve did, doesn’t want to doesn’t know how to isn't prepared to give Steve what he wants.

The tensity and paranoia hasn’t stopped at all. Had relaxed momentarily, before the stupid cat moved and threw everything off, that alone being enough to fuck with his brain, knock everything out of place.

He doesn’t trust Steve.

He should but he doesn’t.

“I don’t trust you.” He’s gripping the fork in his left hand now, a potential weapon if needed. Steve looks at him, a little surprised, and then shrugs.

“Yeah,” he says, “you shouldn’t, you don’t have any reason to.” He takes a bite of his spaghetti, which Bucky recognizes as Steve giving him time to take that in without making it worse, without making it more uncomfortable than it already is. “You’re scared and you have every reason to be,” Steve continues, “that’s okay. You’re safe here, though. Everything’s on your terms, you know? You don’t trust me, but–” He shrugs again. “I trust you.”

“You shouldn’t.” It’s true, maybe is the only goddamn thing he knows, doesn’t even know his own name (but responds to Bucky because that’s what Steve calls him) but knows that Steve shouldn’t trust him.

Shouldn’t trust the same weapon that fired bullets into flesh, attacked and brutalized, nearly killed.

He knows he is a weapon, first and foremost. He knows he almost killed Steve. He knows Steve shouldn’t trust him.

“Maybe not,” Steve says. Bucky realizes he’s breathing too fast, his head and heart both pounding; he picks up the cat and ignores when she complains about being pulled away from her food and ignores the little pinpricks of claws digging into his arms and tries to just focus on petting the stupid cat. “I mean, there’s a lot of people who’d probably agree with you. But you’re not here to hurt me. If you were, you would’ve done it already. And I don’t think you want to.”

There’s no way to answer that. He wants to leave.

“Okay.”

Steve smiles a little (ingenuine, Bucky thinks) and stands up and Bucky’s heart leaps into his throat as he drops the fork in exchange for a proper combat knife, can’t stop himself from pulling it out of its sheath. He moves the cat, doesn’t want her to get hurt, cut; she goes back to eating the wet food in the bowl.

Steve rinses off his plate and puts it in the dishwasher and nods towards the hallway.

“In my bedroom if you need me, alright?” Bucky nods and lets Steve go.

He finishes the rest of the spaghetti quickly. It doesn’t make him sick–the nausea pulls at his stomach, but he thinks that’s from eating a full meal as opposed to what the meal was.

He retreats into the second bedroom afterward, bringing the cat and her food dish with him. He sets the dish directly under the covered window and tucks himself into the corner. His arm pulls painfully but he ignores it. Painful but not dysfunctional, not impeding on overall functioning, disregard.

Time passes, presumably. He talks at the cat when she meows, words coming out in Russian. Stupid stray that latched onto him. He likes her.

_She have a name?_

He doesn’t know what people name cats and wonders, a little, if he should name his. Briefly considers asking Steve, then squashes down that thought.

Steve. Steve knocks on the doorframe again, stack of clothes in hand. Sweatpants and sweatshirt, t-shirt, wool socks, underwear.

“Hey,” he says, “didn’t give you anything earlier when you showered. Can I just put this on the bed?” Bucky nods. Steve stays towards the far wall, which Bucky is sure must be intentional, but appreciates.

And then hates himself for appreciating.

“You need anything?” Steve asks from the doorway again. Bucky shakes his head and doesn’t really hear what Steve says next, but apparently whatever it is doesn’t warrant a response and Steve leaves him alone again.

He’s tired. He wants to sleep.

He stays in his room until he hears Steve go to his and then gets up and follows. Steve looks up when he enters.

“Hey.” Steve’s favorite fucking word, Bucky thinks, along with _okay_.

“I need to sleep,” he says. Steve frowns, barely noticeable. Probably completely imperceptible to anyone else.

“Okay,” Steve says, and Bucky thinks he sounds confused, lost. The irony leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. “Do you want to sleep in here?”

“…Okay,” he agrees. It’s the simplest answer, the safest answer, but also…honest. More or less. True, maybe, if not honest.

“I can sleep on the couch,” Steve offers. Bucky shakes his head. “No?”

“Don’t–it’s not– _fuck_ ,” he says, the last word a whisper that Steve hears anyway.

“Okay, Bucky. Where do you want to sleep?” He looks at the bed and then at the window, uncovered. Dangerous. The space next to it is small and shielded from view, nestled between the wall and bed, just wide enough for Steve’s nightstand to fit in. The floor is carpeted; plenty comfortable to sleep on. Luxurious in comparison to where else he’s slept.

He nods towards it, question going unspoken.

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, “go ahead. I’ll be right back, I’ll get you a pillow and some blankets.” He wants to protest, his instinct is to protest; _take what you’re given_ , he remembers, and Steve has left the room before he can say anything about it.

He comes back with two blankets and a pillow as promised and hands them to Bucky, then steps out of the way. The cat launches herself at Bucky and Steve smiles.

“You okay down there?” he asks while Bucky shifts and settles, the cat curling up next to the pillow. 

“Yeah.”

“Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Can I get the light?”

“Yes.”

So Steve does. Bucky can still see perfectly clearly without it.

He doesn’t know how long he lays there, eyes closed, left arm resting on the floor and right hand on the back of the cat. The blankets are under him; he won’t have to untangle himself from the blankets in case of a fight. Steve’s breathing evens out after a while, light and steady.

“Steve,” he whispers, curious.

“Hmm?” 

“There were trees,” he says, not having actually expected a response from Steve. “In the– it was cold and there were trees and the train.”

“Yeah, Buck.”

“What kind were they?”

“Mm.” And for a moment, Bucky thinks that’s as much as he’s getting. “Alpines, maybe? ‘M not sure, Buck.” Steve sounds apologetic.

“Alpine,” Bucky repeats. “The cat.” And when Steve doesn’t say anything further, Bucky just whispers “okay” and closes his eyes and goes back to fighting with sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

Steve’s taken to going on walks in the mornings after he picks up a coffee and pastry, even though the weather is turning. He calls Sam most of those mornings before Sam clocks in at the V.A., sometimes to talk about Bucky and sometimes to talk to the only other friend he really has at the moment.

This morning is the former. Not by Steve’s intention, but because Sam answers the phone with, “I found what I was looking into.”

“What?” Steve says, also not bothering with a hello. He hadn’t asked Sam to look into anything.

“So you like, totally didn’t ask for this, but I had a suspicion and it’s better for you to know what you’re dealing with. Potentially dealing with.” Steve doesn’t like the sound of that at all, but he waits for Sam to continue. “And it’s just going to be blunt because there’s no easy way around it, but…” Steve still waits, and Sam sighs. “How’s he been doing?”

“Quiet, scared, doesn’t do things without prompting,” Steve sums up. He wants Sam to get to the point already. Sam sighs again.

“Yeah, that’s to be expected, probably. Look, Steve, I think you can expect a pretty impressive amount of brain damage here.”

And if Steve had expected anything, it definitely hadn’t been that.

“Okay,” he says, and sits down on some stranger’s building stoop because he doesn’t want to hear whatever Sam’s going to say while standing up. “Okay. Right. What?”

“I was looking at the files Nat dropped a few months back–” and he’s a little surprised to realize it has indeed been months since Insight went down, “–and so, what we know is they had a way of wiping memories. What we didn’t know is that he wasn’t the first person they tried it on, just the first person that survived, because it seems like it just turned everyone else into a vegetable.” Steve puts his coffee down next to him because he thinks if he brings it to his mouth again it’ll make him sick. “It’s the serum, probably, that allowed his brain to heal faster. Well, allowed his brain to heal, period. But to do that over and over and over again for decades–I know that anything remotely medical is out of the question. But if we had access to a brain scan, I think we’d find a lot of grey matter. Parts of his brain that’d just…have no activity at all.”

“Shit,” Steve breathes out, not one to curse but it’s not like there’s anything else for him to say.

“Yeah,” Sam says apologetically, “there’s more. When the brain can’t get enough oxygen it has–well, it kills off brain cells. Is the simple version of it. It’s called hypoxia and I’m pretty sure that it happened at least a few times, looking at this from a medical standpoint.” Steve has no idea what he’s getting out of the files because they’ve read the same ones and Steve picked up on nothing of the sort, but Sam’s the one with a degree in…he doesn’t actually know. Brain stuff.

“And PTSD,” Sam keeps going, “fucks with the hippocampus, the part of the brain that makes and keeps memories and is in charge of emotional regulation. Which I think we can assume he’s definitely got a problem with, and is definitely not helping his case at all.” Sam stops talking, something Steve’s pretty he’s doing to let him absorb the information, which he’s thankful for. “So, that’s not great.”

“No,” Steve agrees after a long minute of silence. “But–?”

“Ah,” Sam says, “ _But_. I think between the serum and your guy’s sheer fucking determination, he’s gonna improve. He’s made it this far on his own and it’s been a while since any, ah, erasure. I’d chance that some of that grey matter is already starting to work on repairing itself. Full recovery is…less likely.” He sounds apologetic and Steve bites back a snappish comment, because it’s entirely unwarranted even if he already knows better than to count on anything even _close_ to full recovery. “But I think that if you keep it up, keep giving him a safe place to exist and keep helping him relearn how to be a person, then he’s gonna improve.”

Steve stays silent for a long minute, thinking. He’s not surprised, exactly, he knows that Sam is more likely correct than not, but it doesn’t mean he has to like what he hears.

“Okay,” he says after another long silence. “Thanks for telling me.”

“I thought you’d want to know,” Sam says earnestly. “I know it’s not nice to hear, but I think it’s a likelihood to be aware of. If it does come up, that’s something that I can actually help with long distance, giving you guidance with it and stuff.” And then there’s another, shorter pause before Sam’s tone changes entirely and he says, “So I got dinner with this girl Annie last night,” and Steve has never been happier to hear about a Tinder date.

He picks up a croissant for Bucky before he heads home. He finds Bucky in his bedroom with Alpine. He knows Bucky leaves the apartment sometimes and usually brings his cat with him, but he has yet to actually see Bucky go.

He puts the croissant on a plate and then knocks on Bucky’s door frame lightly.

“Hey, brought you food,” he says, “You should eat. You want it in here or the living room?” Bucky doesn’t answer and his face doesn’t show much expression, but he follows Steve into the living room when Steve goes.

Bucky is less scared now, Steve thinks. Not _not_ scared, but less than he was at first. There's still moments where he looks utterly lost and like he’s bracing himself for something unavoidable and probably torturous, but that look is less common.

He eats and lets Alpine nibble at the flaky dough a little and mutters in Russian, probably about her being dumb and needy.

The irritated-about-Alpine act is definitely that, an act, because Bucky is unbelievably protective of her and still has yet to let Steve pet her, but it’s an act that Steve is willing to let go unmentioned. There’s no reason to upset Bucky over the most unquestionably good thing he has.

(And admitting that it’s the cat hurts his pride a little, but he’s not above doing it. Alpine have no ulterior motive except maybe swiping some extra food when Steve nags Bucky into eating, and she's not capable of torture. Neither of which are things that Bucky knows for certain about Steve, at least not yet.)

Steve tries not to dwell on what Sam said and it doesn’t exactly work, but the day still manages to go well.

Even if he can’t stop glancing at the way Bucky sits with his arm up on the ottoman and his head on his knees and wondering if any potential brain damage is really going to be insurmountable.

Weeks pass, and then it’s been a month, then two, and Bucky is still there.

He seems more and more lucid by the day, and Steve finds himself saying _thank fucking God_ to a deity he’s not sure he believes in anymore, because Bucky’s first few weeks had been nothing short of terrifying.

Not because of the various weapons that were constantly to hand or because of the few times that Steve found them pointed at himself when he startled Bucky, but because most of the time, Bucky had seemed completely and utterly lost. Like he didn’t know who he was, where he was, who Steve was. Like he spent most of the time hallucinating, still mentally stuck in whatever hell Hydra had kept him in when they weren’t using him (and it still makes Steve sick to his stomach to think of that word, _using_ , in relation to his best friend, but there’s no point in dodging the truth).

Massive brain damage, Steve remembers Sam saying. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him that the lucidity is a drastic improvement.

With the lucidity, though, brings anger. Anger and frustration and resentment and a whole cocktail of unpleasant feelings that Steve is okay with letting himself be the object of, because it’s always pretty clear that Bucky snapping or cursing isn’t actually directed _at_ him. He just happens to be the one there when Bucky needs to let it out. So he doesn’t mind.

Besides, it’s not like Bucky doesn’t have plenty of reasons to be angry.

Most of the time, though, Bucky is still pretty…Steve doesn’t know what to say. _Subdued_ is probably the best descriptor. Most of the time, Bucky sits next to the ottoman in the living room (when Steve is there) or in the corner of his bedroom (when Steve is in his own). Still doesn’t speak for the most part—although that’s started to change, with Bucky sometimes stating bits and pieces of memories without prompting—still needs to be reminded to eat, still asks permission for damn near everything.

But he’s lucid. Present. Aware. And maybe sometimes he’ll slip into Russian without realizing and get confused when Steve doesn’t understand and then get angry with himself when he figures out the reason, but even then he doesn’t have that same lost-and-terrified look that he did during the first few weeks. So it’s a definite, marked improvement.

Except sometimes it’s not. Because apparently being more aware of the world around him means that when he’s _not_ , when something goes wrong in his brain and thrusts him back into God-only-knows, it hits harder than it ever did in those first weeks.

And Steve can’t lie. He can’t even really find a better way to say it: it’s fucking terrifying.

He knows that his version, watching Bucky slip like that, is far less terrifying than whatever Bucky’s version is, whatever Bucky has going on in his brain. But it’s still fucking terrifying.

Right now he’s sitting in the living room across from Bucky, who’s cornered between the ottoman and the wall like he usually is. Right now, though, he seems like he’s doing his damn best to disappear, or maybe merge into the wall with how hard he’s pressing himself against it. Steve can hear his breathing, which is definitely too fast, and Bucky keeps glancing around with wild eyes. Sometimes flinches back and hits the wall hard, trying to get away from whatever perceived threat there is.

Alpine isn’t anywhere to be found, which makes Steve a little bit worried, because usually the cat helps Bucky when he gets mixed up on the wheres, whens, whats, and whys of everything. But this time she’d gotten Steve’s attention, walked into his bedroom yowling her little head off, and Steve had gotten up to learn whatever she was complaining about. Found Bucky like this, confused and scared out of his mind, and then she left to go hide out somewhere.

Bucky’s got a knife in his left hand and a military-issue pistol on the floor next to his right and he’s mumbling intermittently. Steve responds every time he does but whatever Bucky is saying is in Russian and he doesn’t know what to say back. Just settles for, “It’s Steve, you’re home, you’re safe, it’s okay. We’re okay,” repeatedly, hoping it gets through to Bucky. Even if it doesn’t make sense (and he knows it probably doesn’t, because he doubts anything makes sense to Bucky right now), he hopes it’s something that Bucky can cling to, use to drag himself out of wherever he’s stuck right now.

A part of him wonders if touch would help. He isn’t sure; Bucky keeps flinching away from something, Steve isn’t sure what, but he also thinks that it might have a better chance of helping Bucky ground himself again. Regardless, now isn’t the time to try, because Bucky is still territorial as all hell and Steve isn’t about to unearth that landmine while Bucky is like this.

Bucky says something again, still in Russian, and Steve says, “It’s okay, it’s me, it’s Steve. You’re at home, you’re safe, you’re–”

“Steve.”

Bucky still doesn’t look present and now he’s frowning and Steve’s pretty sure he’s struggling to parse out whatever’s happening, but that’s okay. He can navigate those waters.

“Yeah, Buck,” he says, trying to keep his voice soft and unintimidating. “It’s me. Your friend, Steve. We’re at home in Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn.” And there’s an accent to Bucky’s voice that usually isn’t there, which means he’s putting all his effort into dragging his brain into English and he can’t put any effort into having the right enunciation, but Steve couldn’t care less.

“Yeah,” he says again. “We grew up here. Spent a lot of time hanging out, causing trouble–”

“You,” Bucky says, and it’s in Russian but that’s okay too because Steve knows the word, has started studying to try and help Bucky when his brain gets stuck in a different language at times like this.

“What about me, Bucky?” he asks in English because his Russian isn’t _that_ good yet.

“Fights. You got in fights.” And in spite of everything, Steve grins.

“Yeah. I did that a lot, and you’d always chew me out for it. Saved me from getting beat into the dirt first, and then chewed me out.”

“Deserved it,” Bucky mumbles, and Steve lets out a breath of air that might be something akin to a laugh.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I guess I did, a lot of the time.”

Bucky frowns again and looks up. His eyes are a little less wild looking when he meets Steve’s.

“Alpine?”

“I think she’s in your room.” Bucky doesn’t respond. “Do you want to go get her?” Bucky nods. “Can I come with you?” He nods again, even though he looks completely baffled about why Steve is asking. So Steve stands up and refrains from extending a hand to help Bucky up. Bucky takes the gun off the floor and sheaths the knife and follows Steve to his doorway. Steve doesn’t enter–he doesn’t think Bucky would understand the question if Steve asked if he could, he thinks Bucky would answer according to what he thinks is the right response, and Steve isn’t going to encroach on what Bucky has made very clear is his space.

Alpine is laying on the bed and meows when she sees Bucky. He taps his chest and she jumps, grabs onto his sweatshirt with her claws and settles on the arm he places underneath her. He pets her a little and she nuzzles at his face. Steve can hear her rattly purr from the doorway. He smiles.

And then Bucky tenses up again and his head snaps up to look at Steve. Steve doesn’t know why, what changed, but–

“It’s okay,” he says instantly, trying to put a stop to whatever threw Bucky off again, trying to diffuse his clear-as-day terror as quickly as he can. “Everything’s okay, Bucky, I promise.”

Bucky looks at him warily.

“You’re safe. Alpine’s safe. I’m safe. It’s okay, we’re okay.”

Slowly, still distrustful, Bucky nods.

“I’m going to go back to the living room, okay?” Steve says, pretty sure that Bucky’ll follow, and he’s right. Bucky sits back down a few moments after Steve goes back to the couch. His legs are extended in front of him, flat on the floor, which Steve thinks must be a good thing. It's not a defensive position, means Bucky is relaxed enough to not be crouched on his haunches ready to run or fight.

“Are you tired?” he asks, because he thinks Bucky must be. Bucky doesn’t respond. Just watches, still wary, so Steve changes tact. “If you’re tired, I can stay here while you sleep,” he says. That’s something that helps, they’ve learned; Bucky can only sleep if Steve is there. It hadn’t made sense until he’d mentioned it to Sam and Sam had said, “Oh, firewatch,” without a second’s consideration. And then his explanation and reasoning had made perfect sense and it was something that Steve had felt comfortable enough to bring up so he did, and he’d gotten a bitterly amused look and Bucky going, “Well, someone has to for you.”

Which explained not only Bucky’s refusal to sleep without Steve there but also his insistence on sitting in Steve’s bedroom awake while Steve slept. And if it was that easy of a problem to solve, if it meant Bucky sleeping in his living room spot during the day while Steve sat on the couch, he had absolutely no reason not to do it.

It takes Bucky a long time to respond to Steve’s question. Steve just waits patiently, knowing that Bucky’s probably struggling to figure out what his body and brain are telling him. (Bucky’d explained that once, when Steve was nagging him about food and Bucky had snapped at him. “I don’t fucking _know_ what I fucking _feel_ , Steve, I don’t know what ‘hungry’ fucking _feels_ like, I don’t fucking try not to fucking eat but I don’t fucking know when I _need_ to,” he’d said. Angry and bitter and so genuinely distraught that Steve’d felt his heart break a little.)

So Steve waits and after a minute or two, Bucky says, “Yeah. I think so.”

“I’ll be here, if you want to try sleeping.”

And that seems to be good enough for Bucky, or maybe he’s just that exhausted, because he draws his legs up towards his body and curls himself around the top of the ottoman and leans over and closes his eyes.

——

He doesn’t dream.

Or maybe he does and he just doesn’t remember it upon waking, because he doesn’t fucking remember fucking _anything_ , but he’ll take that. He doesn’t care that much one way or the other, because not dreaming is a whole lot better than its alternative.

He wakes up twitchy and edgy and feeling too fucking cooped up in the little apartment. So he goes, runs, leaves the cat with Steve and retreats because there’s no other fucking option.

The subway system is big and easy enough to navigate with some practice and the tunnels aren’t hard to get into.

He remembers spending months in an abandoned station with the stupid cat and desperately keeping her from sniffing at the still-live third rail. He hasn’t gone back to that station since he left it in late October, since he went and let himself go with Steve.

Now he just goes into the tunnels. Jumps the turnstile and slinks down and it’s easy to not be noticed when he doesn’t want to be, knows exactly how to make himself invisible to commuters and tourists and everyone else. And the tunnels are dark and smell of something he doesn’t want to think about and fuck, maybe he shouldn’t have left maybe he should’ve fucking stayed at fucking Steve’s because now the scent is starting to get to him but it’s not enough for him to exit already so he doesn’t.

There’s no reason for him to run, there’s nothing chasing him, but he can’t not. So he runs.

Trains pass him however many times. He doesn’t know because it’d be stupid to count and he just switches to another track when he needs to. He can hear and feel them coming from farther off than any normal person would be able to so it’s not a problem. He doesn’t even know if being hit by a fucking train would kill him; God fucking knows that apparently falling hundreds of feet from one didn’t. He doesn’t know what _would_ kill him at this point and despite his bitter comments to Steve asking for a bullet to the skull, he’s not actually all that eager to find out. (It’s not like he hasn’t been shot before, either.)

It’s harder to gauge time underground. That had fucked with him a lot during the summer. When he hadn’t found the cat yet so he didn’t have a stupid white little fuzzy thing to yell its stupid little cat head off whenever it was hungry, which seemed to happen at pretty well-defined six hour intervals. He doesn’t know how long he spends running and he thinks he could spend fucking forever running except he doesn’t and he doesn’t even fucking know why not.

It’s dark when he forces himself above ground again. He exits to a station in Queens, which means he went a lot farther than he thought, but he doesn’t care and gets on the first Brooklyn-bound train that comes. No one looks twice at him, which is the way he planned it and completely unsurprising. No one wants to pay attention to a sweaty disheveled twenty-something on the back of the train and he’s fine with it. He’s fucking thankful for it because it’s already taking all his effort to not fucking panic at the feeling of being caged into the subway car. People ignore him but wouldn’t ignore someone putting a metal arm through a metal subway car. So he doesn’t, even if he’s crawling up his own fucking spine and feels totally and completely out-of-his-fucking-mind insane.

He gets off the train earlier than he needs to because it really is starting to feel fucking suffocating, and it’s not like he’s tired from running. It’s just a few miles to Steve’s apartment and he doesn’t even need to go back, but Steve would fret and the stupid cat would probably be unhappy about it. So he picks up his pace again and runs and lets himself back into Steve’s apartment through the fire escape.

He’s silent; it hadn’t taken him long to figure out how to slide the window open from the outside without making any noise, and the newspaper he’s plastered over them aren’t an issue. Steve is in the living room and there’s something playing on the television, the volume one notch up from muted. He startles when he sees Bucky and Bucky realizes he must have forgotten to make noise again. It happens sometimes—less often now that he’s started to believe he’s _allowed_ to make noise, but it still happens.

“Hi,” Steve says simply. Bucky waves. “Your cat missed you.”

“Cat’s an idiot,” Bucky mutters as Alpine appears out of seemingly nowhere.

“She spent the whole time under the couch complaining until she fell asleep.” And Bucky knows why Steve’s sharing, knows that he hopes it’ll help Bucky remember that the apartment is fucking safe, stupid little cat and all, but Bucky doesn’t need it. He’s the one that came back.

The rice cooker in the kitchen is warm and full because of fucking course Steve had the foresight to make rice, but Bucky can’t find it in him to truly be irritated over it because rice actually sounds fucking good right about now and he knows he has a matter of minutes before Steve starts nagging him about eating.

He hunches over the rice cooker with a fork and eats what he can directly out of it and drops the fork in the sink after.

His skin feels gross with dried sweat but he doesn’t have the energy to take a bath yet and the showerhead is still too close to his face for it to be something he can do without panicking over being fucking waterboarded, so he sits down on the floor in the same spot he always does. Alpine jumps on top of the ottoman and curls herself up in the crook of his elbow, using his arm as a pillow. Steve’s turned his attention back to the tv and Bucky feels calmer. Maybe. Enough so to be able to sit for a while and stay present.

He has an eyeline to the door and the windows and the walls aren’t closing in on him. The cat is purring and then the rattle peters out as she falls asleep and Steve seems content on the couch and for the first time in God knows how many hours, Bucky finds himself able to relax his guard.

He hears the theme song of Steve’s tv show twice before he shifts his arm out from under Alpine and stands.

“I’m going to take a bath?” he says, a statement and question in one.

“Sounds good, Buck,” Steve agrees. So he gets up and goes into the bathroom and closes the door behind him and that’s where things start to go wrong yet a-fucking-gain.

——

The amount of mental shit Bucky has to wade through to just be able to _exist_ is unfair. 

Steve knows that it sounds childish to talk about unfairness, he knows that it doesn’t actually help Bucky at all, but it’s just not _fair_.

He also knows that sometimes the apartment is just…too much to handle. Bucky’s brain hits its ability to cope, for whatever reason, and he has to leave. It’s fine. It’s not like Steve can hold it against him. It’s not like he ever would. And Bucky has always come back. Sometimes—usually—sweaty and dirty and sometimes bloody and pretty much always looking worse for wear, but as long as he keeps coming back, Steve can keep working with it.

So when Bucky returns, Steve doesn’t ask where he went, and Bucky seems to be lucid again, so Steve doesn’t ask about that either. (He’d asked Sam, though, minutes after Bucky left. He hadn’t seen an episode that bad in a while and even though he can navigate it without catastrophic results, it’s not _good_. It’s the polar opposite of good, actually.)

(He feels a deep pang of guilt every time he calls Sam to ask about these things, but Sam doesn’t pry and does the best he can with what Steve gives him and Steve doesn’t want to think about how much more lost he’d be without him. So this time Sam talked about dissociation, and again with the words that didn’t used to exist, but being able to call it something helps.)

Bucky goes into the bathroom without any prompting, it being a choice of his own volition, which Steve thinks means things are better than they could be. But because nothing is ever fair, it’s not long before things take a turn for the worse.

Alpine woke up when Bucky moved and followed him into the bathroom, because she really is attached to his side all the time. Steve hears the bath run and then stop and then its quiet for a while, and then the cat starts yowling like she’s being…tortured is the first word that comes to mind, but it’s not applicable so he resolutely doesn’t think it.

She’s a talkative cat and Steve wouldn’t be concerned, except the plaintive yowling doesn’t stop, and her relentless meowing in the morning was what got Steve’s attention about Bucky’s earlier dissociative episode.

He knocks on the bathroom door lightly, hoping that it’s nothing, that Alpine is just being noisy for the sake of it. There’s no response from the other side.

“Bucky?” he says, his voice quiet but definitely still audible. “You okay in there?” No response. Normally he would brush it off, think nothing of it, but after the morning, that’s harder said than done. Bucky is still possessive, territorial, and Steve doesn’t want to invade his space. Certainly not when Bucky is already on shaky mental ground. But he doesn’t know how else to help.

Just because he’s better at navigating this doesn’t mean he’s good.

“Can I come in, Buck?” he says after another knock at the door. He tries the handle and it’s unlocked, so he takes a breath and pushes his anxiety to the side and opens the door.

The first thing he notices, oddly enough, is that the bathroom is freezing cold. The second is that Alpine is on the sink and not closer to Bucky like she usually is. The third is that Bucky is definitely not present. Checked out. Dissociated. Whatever. And it’s not good, it’s _never_ good, but by the look in Bucky’s eyes, Steve thinks it’s worse than usual.

He sits down on the floor slowly, leaving the door open.

“You’re at home, Bucky,” he says, “it’s just me and your cat. You’re safe.” He thinks back to Sam’s advice from his earlier phone call and adds, “Whatever you’re seeing right now, wherever you are in your head, it’s okay. It’s not there, it can’t hurt you. You’re safe.” He repeats it like a mantra for what feels like forever. Bucky’s eyes are still glazed over and unfocused after what must be half an hour of Steve talking and waiting and talking, and even though Bucky has dissociated for longer before, it doesn’t mean Steve wants a repeat.

He thinks touch would help and he thinks Bucky must feel trapped in the small space and he knows that it could very quickly go very wrong. He doesn’t know what else there is to do.

He inches towards the bathtub very carefully, still talking.

“Okay,” he says and exhales deeply, trying to calm himself. “It’s me, Bucky, it’s Steve. I’m going to lean over towards you.” Bucky doesn’t respond. It’s unsurprising. “Okay. I’m going to–” Bucky’s breath hitches slightly and Steve pulls his hand back, and then instantly starts to worry about mixed signals and confusing Bucky even more. “I’m going to move slow,” he says, “and I’m going to touch your shoulder, but I promise, I _swear_ Bucky,” and his voice cracks but he doesn’t stop because he doesn’t think he can at this point. “I swear I’d never hurt you, I promise.”

Bucky’s eyes have shifted to watch Steve even though he hasn’t moved his body at all. He moves excruciatingly slowly and then his skin brushes up against Bucky’s and Bucky flinches like he’s been shocked.

“Sorry,” Steve says instantly and tries to quell the rising panic he feels at having made that decision, because it was a stupid decision it was something to have been talked about it was a bad idea all around but he didn’t know what else to do and now, _now_ he’s panicking. “Bucky, I’m sorry, I didn’t– I didn’t mean to scare you, it’s okay, you’re okay.”

Bucky looks back at Steve. His eyes are wide with terror and he looks horribly, painfully confused and lost.

“You can go,” Steve says even though Bucky is clearly not in any sort of state to get anywhere by himself. Steve moves towards the wall away from the door to let Bucky see that it’s wide open. “It’s okay, I’m not keeping you here, I promise.”

He keeps talking and definitely does not try to touch Bucky again. Steve doesn’t watch him too closely because he knows it’ll only make Bucky more scared, but he pays attention. He can’t not.

Maybe he should go. Maybe he should give Bucky space, especially after scaring him so badly. Maybe he’s making wrong decision after wrong decision. But he can’t leave Bucky here alone, scared, confused, sitting in cold bath water and probably maybe _God he hopes not_ hallucinating. So he stays.

He talks aimlessly, rambling, tells stories and reassures Bucky and says whatever comes to mind and hopes once again that Bucky can use it to drag himself out of wherever he’s stuck in his mind.

His forearms are resting on the rim of the bathtub and he doesn’t realize it until Bucky’s flesh hand twitches enough to catch his attention.

“It’s okay,” Steve says without knowing what exactly he’s giving permission for. “You can move, it’s okay.”

And then, ever so lightly, Bucky’s hand touches his arm.

He doesn’t jump or pull away but his heart does leap into his throat.

“Bucky,” he breathes. Bucky pulls his hand away and looks up at Steve. “It’s okay,” Steve reassures him, “you can touch, if you want to. It’s okay, Bucky.”

He still looks so lost and confused but a little less scared, and he raises his hand again. Steve smiles and blinks rapidly a few times to keep himself from visibly tearing up.

“You can,” he repeats, and Bucky places his hand against Steve’s arm again.

His fingertips are cold and calloused and oh so light on Steve’s arm.

There’s nothing for Steve to say. Nothing. (Except for _I love you_ , because it’s the only thing he can think at the moment and God knows it’s true, it’s always been true, but now isn’t the time.) So he’s silent and lets Bucky slowly move his hand, exploring Steve’s skin. He’s frowning a little and even if he’s still lost and confused, the intrigue and curiosity on his face is all his.

“You don’t–” Bucky starts to say. Then words stop abruptly as his frown deepens and he doesn’t finish the sentence. After a long pause, Bucky looks up. “Your shirt is wet.” It is, Steve realizes, Bucky must have sloshed water on him when he flinched.

“It’s okay,” Steve replies quickly, “it’s just a shirt, it’ll dry. It’s not a problem.”

Bucky slips back into silence and his eyes are still glazed, but he doesn’t move his hand off of the bathtub rim, and Steve takes that as a good sign.

Alpine reappears and hops onto the back of the toilet tank, which Steve also takes as a good sign. She doesn’t like to be around Bucky when something’s really wrong.

Being able to think for a minute, Steve realizes that Bucky must be freezing. There’s not a drop of steam in the bathroom meaning the water must be cold, and Bucky is covered in goosebumps.

That’s not a good sign; Bucky loathes the cold, and it’s one of the few opinions he’s able to express so far. Steve hopes that that Bucky just turned on the tap at whatever temperature and didn’t check before getting in and now he doesn’t have the energy to change it, rather than it being some form of punishment that Bucky thinks he deserves, but Steve is honestly unsure.

“Are you cold?” he asks after some consideration. It’s a pretty safe question, he thinks. Yes or no with no implication of what Bucky _should_ choose, and at worst, Bucky will be confused about why Steve’s asking, or maybe why it matters.

Bucky frowns—confusion, then—and shakes his head. He’s not lying, Steve knows. Lying implies willful deceit, and he knows that Bucky is being truthful, but Bucky’s spent enough time snapping at Steve about how he doesn’t know what his own body tells him anymore that Steve thinks he must be cold. He just hasn’t figured it out, registered it, the phrasing is unimportant but the point is the same.

Even if Bucky doesn’t think he’s cold, Steve’s pretty sure he must be.

“Okay,” Steve says, not arguing the point. “Come on, you should get dried off.” He doesn’t phrase it as a question. He thinks that right now, given the option, Bucky would be content to sit in cold bath water until the end of time, whenever that may be.

Bucky frowns for a long time and then looks back up at Steve and says, “okay,” with the telltale Slavic accent that means he’s struggling with English. Steve’s surprised at hearing him speak out loud but he just smiles.

“What towel do you want?” Steve asks. There’s two that have definitely become Bucky’s towels, as opposed to Steve’s towels that Bucky uses. There’s nothing special about them, at least as far as Steve can see, they’re both cheap ones he got from Target before moving in—but something in Bucky’s mind has made the seafoam green and navy blue towels _his_ , and Steve isn’t about to argue with that. He can buy more towels.

(He probably should buy more towels, because he wants Bucky to have nice towels, and he got what he paid for with the Target brand.)

Bucky shrugs, and when Steve doesn’t say anything, he decides, “Blue.” Bucky stands up in the tub and Steve hands him the towel. Bucky stares blankly at Steve.

“C’mon, Bucky,” Steve says, “let’s get out of the tub and get you dried off and warmed up, okay?” Bucky steps out of the tub and rubs the towel over his hair. The movement is jerky and mechanical but it’s better than nothing. Steve averts his eyes. “I’ll go get you clothes,” he says, not wanting Bucky to get changed back into his jeans and t-shirt from earlier but knowing that he will if not given an alternative.

Clothes are another thing Bucky’s particular about and Steve hasn’t asked about that either. At least not yet—he thinks that’s one of the things that he might be able to ask about someday, but that day isn’t here yet. Right now, Bucky alternates between hating clothes regardless of what they are and hating being unclothed and he seems to swing between the two without any tangible reason. It’s not like Bucky _needs_ a tangible reason—Steve thinks he’s more than justified in his preference and is, admittedly, proud as all hell when Bucky is able to show any sort of preference—and it’s not like there’s a problem if Bucky wants to wear only sweatpants.

Steve’s also noticed that on the days when clothing isn’t pushing too hard at something Bucky can’t handle, everything he wears is both very warm and very soft. That’s not a problem either. Steve knows that Bucky takes his clothing out of Steve’s dresser, so he just gets sweats in Bucky’s size and leaves them in a drawer where he knows Bucky will find them.

Right now, though, the dedicated spot in his drawer for Bucky’s sweatpants and hoodies is empty. He grabs his own pair of joggers and finds a sweatshirt on the living room couch and then finds Bucky still in the bathroom.

“Hey,” Steve says, not wanting to catch Bucky off guard yet again. Bucky looks up at Steve’s voice.

“Hi,” he says back, making Steve the one caught off guard. He’s dried off some—not _well_ , there’s still water dripping from his hair and onto his shoulders—but Steve knows that it’s a step in the right direction. He holds out his hand, which also surprises Steve a bit, but he hands Bucky the clothes.

“You think you can try to sleep some tonight?” Bucky pulls the sweatshirt over his head and stares. “I’m not tired.”

“You don’t have to–”

“Don’t have to what, Buck?” Steve prompts when it becomes clear that Bucky isn’t going to finish his sentence. Bucky just shakes his head and reaches his right hand out for Alpine, who’s gone back to sitting on the rim of the drained bathtub, to sniff at. “Are you still hungry?” He shakes his head again. “Come sit with me while I watch tv?”

“Okay.”

Even if Bucky’s still only agreeing because it’s what he thinks Steve wants or expects or requires, there’s no harm in sitting there and watching tv for a bit. It’s only nine pm.

He sits down back where he used to be, knowing that Bucky will join him if he decides he wants to. He does a few minutes later.

This time, though, he sits on the couch.

He sits tucked into the opposite corner of the couch: left arm on the armrest, right hand holding a small folding knife, knees pulled towards his chest, Alpine perched on top of them.

Steve tries very, very hard to watch the television instead of Bucky, because Bucky still doesn’t need to be watched. But the thing is…

The thing _is_ that Steve doesn’t have a clue how to respond to this change in demeanor. It’s a good thing, he knows, because Bucky is more comfortable, at least enough to be able to tensely sit next to him as opposed to tensely sitting across the room from him.

“I’m sorry I touched you earlier,” he says a little out of the blue. Bucky startles and Alpine meows and they both look at him in a way that he would find comical if he didn’t already feel guilty. Bucky frowns, but for a moment it almost looks like a scowl. “I shouldn’t have– not without asking– I mean, I _asked_ , but–”

“It’s fine,” Bucky says, and then when Steve opens his mouth to respond, “ _Steve_. Drop it.”

“Okay,” Steve concedes, not wanting to argue with the finality in Bucky’s voice. He hesitates for a minute before he holds his hand out in between him and Bucky, palm up, and turns back to the tv.

Another episode cycles through and Netflix asks if he’s still watching and when he puts his hand back after saying yes, he feels Bucky’s hand touch his very lightly.

He doesn’t flinch, thank God, because that’s exactly the message that he doesn’t need to send to Bucky right now. Neither of them move for a very long time, but slowly, Bucky’s fingertips start to move across Steve’s hand and forearm; he’s exploring, Steve thinks, like he’s never had human contact before, and then he wonders if Bucky _hasn’t_. At least not that he can remember.

The thought makes him tense up, horrified, and Bucky yanks his hand back suddenly.

“Sorry,” Steve apologizes instantly. He holds his hand out again and Bucky stares, then moves Alpine to his shoulder and stands up.

“I’m going to sleep,” he says.

“Okay,” Steve agrees, surprised. It takes Bucky a moment to actually turn and go into the bedroom—Steve’s bedroom, not his own—and Steve lets the episode finish for posterity’s sake before he follows.

Apparently the world is just throwing him curveball after curveball. Bucky is laying on the mound of blankets that’s been in Steve’s room for a few months now, since the first night that Bucky actually _slept_ , but Bucky hasn’t returned to his blanket-nest since then. He’s laying down, too, head on one of the pillows with Alpine next to him and curled in on herself.

Steve turns on the bedside lamp ( _“At least when it’s fucking light I can believe that it’s either a fucking hallucination or I’m not actually in a fucking Hydra compound even if I fucking_ think _I am–”_ ) and sits down on his bed.

“I’m right here,” he tells Bucky, “and I will be if you need anything.” Bucky doesn’t respond, which is fine—Steve didn’t really expect him to—and he opens the biography that’s been on his nightstand for a few weeks now and starts to read.

Bucky wakes up twice, once around one am and once around four. The first time he jerks awake silently, fear in his eyes when they meet Steve’s, and takes thirty minutes to fall back asleep. The second time he slams his fist into the side of the mattress before he can register where he is and Steve plasters himself against the wall while he talks in his best attempt at being soothing. Bucky drags himself out of bed after that and leaves the apartment for an hour, then returns to sit in the living room. He starts out tucked next to the ottoman, but lets Steve coax him onto the couch around midday.

The next few days are rocky but survivable.

It becomes very quickly apparent over those days that touching, being touched, is a Thing with a capital T. It’s clear that Bucky wants it, likes it, but if Steve is too careless, his attempts at using touch as a comfort end in Bucky flattening himself against the wall and gripping a knife (and once, on another particularly bad day, a gun) like it’s a lifeline.

But letting Bucky get close, reach out, initiate touch– _that_ seems to work. He flinches at first contact still, but relaxes quickly after, and Steve finds himself thanking God for it.

If he can give Bucky one good thing, anything, then he’s going to. That’s a promise. It’s a promise that he hasn’t said out loud, not to himself and not to Bucky, but it’s a promise all the same.

He’s not paying that much attention to actual dates as they come and go, so he’s not expecting the invitation text that Stark sends him about a Valentine’s Day party next week.

When he gets over the shock at the fact that it’s been three months since Bucky showed up outside of Starbucks, he laughs, because of course Stark is throwing a party. Stark likes throwing parties; it’s what he _does_. The text makes it pretty clear that this one is going to be an Avengers-and-friends-only type of get together, because it includes the phrase, “this is an avengers and friends only thing bc fuck everyone else and pepper is the only goddamn person keeping me sane at this point”. It makes Steve wonder what exactly has been going on with Stark, and whether he can actually be considered sane, but he agrees to go.

Stark follows up Steve’s confirmation with a text that reads, _barnes is invited too btw, ur invite includes him_ , and then another one that says, _but let me know if hes coming bc forewarning would be nice before meeting mr murder_. Steve doesn’t justify that with a response, but he does tell Bucky about the invitation that night.

Bucky snorts and says, “Jesus fucking Christ, where do you find these people,” and gives a noncommittal noise with an accompanying gesture when Steve tells him that he’s invited too.

It’s not a no.


	4. Chapter 4

He doesn’t actually decide he’s going to Stark’s stupid Valentine’s Day party until he’s left the house. He doesn’t even really decide until he’s at the stupid fucking tower with the stupid cat curled up inside his sweatshirt and Steve walking ahead to the stupid security desk and signing them in or something. Bucky doesn’t miss the look that the security lady gives him, but she doesn’t say anything—actually, she greets them both by name, but only addresses Steve while he signs them in—and she lets him upstairs without any stupid fucking questions. 

The elevator makes his skin crawl. Steve’s silent save for his breathing so the cramped space is filled with harsh lights and an automated British voice that announces every tenth floor as they go up and he can’t see the stupid fucking speakers for the voice and the cat is putting him on edge for once. 

Part of him wishes Steve would say something in the rambling way he always does. And it’s not like he doesn’t know _why_ Steve rambles: it’s because Steve thinks otherwise Bucky’ll get caught up in his own fucking brain. Most of the time it drives him halfway insane (and he wonders if he already is fucking halfway insane and Steve’s rambling’ll make him lose it altogether), but right now he’s on the brink of having time slip and he wishes Steve would fucking _talk_.

Steve doesn’t. The British voice does instead, announces, “Ninety-fourth floor, enjoy your evening,” and parts the doors for them to exit into a wide hallway. Bucky shifts his arm a little so that Alpine can crawl out of his sweatshirt. She makes a questioning _mrrbp_ sound that makes the corners of Bucky’s mouth twitch into a little smile.

“Dumb cat,” is all he says.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve says as they walk, his voice back to that calm and careful way he’s always fucking talking. “I don’t want you to– you don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to, okay?”

“Because I spend a lot of fucking time talking to people when I don’t fucking want to,” Bucky says, and it comes out harsher than he meant it to and Steve looks a little pained.

“It’s not– you don't have to talk to anyone to make me happy, or– it’s not like that. You _being_ here makes me happy, you coming with me today makes me happy, there’s nothing you need to do to earn my approval. I just want you to be comfortable.” The words sound like a lie but Steve’s voice is so fucking earnest and Bucky stares at him for a second.

“Shut the fuck up, Steve,” he says eventually. Steve grins a little and opens a door.

He feels fucking bombarded by the noise. He tenses, sharply, and the stupid cat on his shoulder complains by way of meowing and Steve turns to look at him like he’s ready to leave without even having taken a step in.

“It’s fine,” he insists before Steve can say anything, “it’s fine, I’m fine, _go_.”

“Okay,” Steve agrees after a minute. He’s too goddamn transparent; Bucky can practically see him weighing his options and deciding not to push. “Whenever you’re ready, Buck,” he says, and then enters and leaves Bucky in the hallway by himself.

He doesn’t want to follow, not really, but thinks that Steve _would_ probably be disappointed if he didn’t, despite how much he insists otherwise. And other people are expecting him too, presumably, because Steve had wanted to have a fucking conversation over it.

( _“If you come,” Steve says, “and you don’t have to, how do you want me to introduce you?”_

 _He hasn’t even fucking thought about it. He falters. ‘Bucky_ ’ _isn’t right, because Steve’s the only person still alive who ever called him Bucky, and he thinks it would be wrong coming out of anyone else’s mouth. Steve called him Bucky as kids and Steve calls him Bucky now and he just started to actually fucking_ remember _being called that, as opposed to simply knowing it’s what he_ was _called. ‘Bucky’ is right coming from Steve’s mouth and no one fucking else’s._

_And Steve is just watching, waiting, fucking patient like he always fucking is, and Bucky can practically feel the goddamn weight of his look._

_“James,” he says, because that was what he was named when he was born and he’s not going to make up any bullshit._

_Steve smiles and looks honest-to-God grateful. “Thanks,” he says, and doesn’t bring it up again._ )

People are expecting him, or James, whoever James is supposed to fucking be, and he would turn and take the subway back home with Alpine clinging to him except that Steve is expecting him too, so he hisses in a breath and opens the door and steps inside.

It’s loud and bright and almost too much, except no one looks at him when he comes in and he slips into a corner easily. There’s only the single door which he still has a clear sightline to, and the window spans floor to ceiling, but the slight distortion tells him that the glass is thick, at least thick enough to resist gunshots. Surveillance easy, building safe, medium threat at worst. Survivable.

The room is crowded, which doesn’t help surveillance, but no one seems to be an active threat. Armed, yes; potentially deadly, yes; a threat, no. He doesn’t relax, because that’s for people with a fucking deathwish—at least, a deathwish they want to come true—but he moves the knife from his sweatshirt pocket to his jeans pocket. Still easily accessible but not quite as tempting. 

He moves the cat off his shoulder. She complains because she complains about fucking everything, but once on the floor she weaves between his legs a few times and headbutts his shin and settles down in a little mound on top of his boots.

“Shush, idiot,” he mutters. He looks around.

He recognizes the people, some of them. The other man and woman from the highway are talking to Steve and someone Bucky doesn’t know, respectively, and he knows the face of Tony Stark. A few people look at him but no one approaches, which he’s thankful for. He can stay—God knows he’s stayed through things a million fucking times worse than this—but he doesn’t trust himself. Doesn’t trust what he might do to someone if they come up to him, and the way to avoid that is leaving, but he’s supposed to stay so he stays. 

Steve comes over to him a couple of times, once with a cup of water and a few grapes that he unsuccessfully tries to nag Bucky into having and once to ask how he is. He shrugs because there’s no right answer but he lets Steve take his hand and squeeze it gently before he goes back to enjoying himself like he fucking should be.

Bucky watches the others. The man with the wings ( _Sam_ , his brain supplies, doing its fucking job for once. _Steve’s friend, VA counselor, licensed social worker, D.C., medium threat armed, low threat unarmed_.) throws a soda can in a blue bin and leaves the room.

Bucky lifts the cat off of his shoe and crooks his arm, letting her squirm around until the little idiot decides to get comfortable again, and follows Sam. He’s not in the hallway, but the doors only go one direction, so Bucky waits. Sam reappears after a few minutes from what Bucky presumes must be the restroom.

“Hey man,” says Sam, not seeming remotely startled or alarmed by Bucky’s presence. “I’m Sam Wilson. Steve’s friend.” He doesn’t hold out his hand for Bucky to shake.

“From the freeway.”

“Yeah. I wanted to introduce myself, actually; I figured that we didn’t get off on the right foot and I wanted to change that.” Bucky doesn’t reply because he doesn’t see any need to. “That your cat?”

Bucky shifts his arm a little bit to try to give Alpine more purchase in case she needs to jump down. “Yes.”

“He’s cute,” Sam says, and Bucky’s hit with a reminder of the first conversation he had with Steve a couple months ago.

“She’s a girl. Alpine.” Sam holds out his hands, not in the frustrating as hell way that Steve does when he’s treating Bucky like a fucking scared wild animal (although Jesus Christ, Bucky can’t fucking blame Steve when he’s fucking insane all the time), but just in benign apology.

“Sorry,” Sam says. “Do you know what breed she is?”

“I found her on the street,” Bucky answers.

“She seems to really love you.” As if on cue, the cat makes a noise that’s not quite a meow.

“Yeah,” Bucky says to her in Russian, “we’re talking about you, idiot, shut up.” Sam’s still watching him. Bucky forces himself to switch back to English and says, “Steve talks to you. About me.” Sam’s expression is briefly indistinguishable and he shrugs.

“Sometimes, yeah,” he admits. “He thinks really highly of you.”

“Steve is a fucking idiot.” Sam laughs, a warm genuine sound that rises from his chest.

“He’s made some questionable choices,” Sam says, and Bucky thinks it might be a joke except he’s not sure what’s funny about it. “I don’t think you count as one of them.” When Bucky doesn’t respond, Sam continues with, “Hey, I’m gonna head back in, but if you want to find me or talk or anything–”

“Okay,” Bucky interrupts, because he knows he won’t and he’s starting to reach the upper limit of his ability to talk to people other than Steve.

“It was nice getting to meet you,” Sam says, and then he’s gone.

Bucky lifts the cat up to eye level and lets her bat at his face with a stupid little paw.

“Yeah, alright,” he says and sets her on his shoulder, where she immediately throws her entire body into grooming Bucky’s hair. “Let’s go.” He braces himself to open the door again and returns to his spot for another hour.

——

Steve doesn’t notice that Bucky’s disappeared until Alpine rubs her head against his ankle while he’s in the middle of talking to one of Pepper’s friends. He looks down, surprised, and then looks over to where Bucky was standing, and his blood runs cold when he sees that he’s gone.

“Where’d your guy go, huh?” he asks, not caring that he’s interrupted a real conversation to talk to the cat. Alpine meows and Steve can’t tell if he’s projecting his worry or she sounds distressed.

It’s at that moment that JARVIS says quietly, from the nearest wall speaker, “Captain Rogers, if I could direct your attention to the hallway,” and Steve excuses himself from the conversation altogether. He steps into the hallway and his heart leaps into his throat, because Bucky is standing stone-still with a gun pointed directly at Tony’s head. Tony is equally frozen, one hand hovering over his watch, and Steve realizes that must be what he uses to call the suit.

“Christ,” Steve whispers to himself and moves carefully between the two of them. He holds his hands up, palms facing Bucky. “Hey,” he says more loudly. “Bucky, what’s going on?”

“He tried–”

“ _Shut up, Tony_ ,” Steve snaps, because he has neither the time nor patience to listen to Stark trying to justify whatever outrageously stupid thing he did to get himself into this situation. “I’m not talking to you. Bucky, you want to tell me what happened?”

Bucky doesn’t lower the gun and it’s as unsettling as ever to be staring down the barrel, but Steve disregards it.

“He’s not taking my arm,” Bucky says. His voice is cold and firm and absolutely terrified, and the only thing that’s keeping Steve from going off on Stark is that it would agitate Bucky.

“No,” Steve agrees, “he’s not. He’s going to walk away from us and give us space, right, Tony?”

“I’m not–”

“You will get fucking _shot_ , Stark,” Steve snaps, even though he’s the one in front of the gun. “I know how to handle this and you _don’t_ and if you don’t leave then you will get shot.” Steve hears receding footsteps after a second and Bucky’s eyes follow Stark as he leaves and his finger moves off the trigger.

“He’s not taking my arm,” Bucky repeats. “It’s mine.”

“You’re right,” Steve agrees, “it is. And you get to decide what happens with it. No one else.”

“He wants to take it.” Steve holds back a sigh and instead sits down on the floor.

“And you can tell him no,” he says. “Sit down with me?” Bucky hesitates, then takes a few steps towards Steve and sits. The gun is still in his hand but he’s no longer holding it like he’s going to use it. “What did he say?”

“He wants to take my arm.”

“Did he tell you why?” Bucky frowns like he's puzzled, which Steve takes as a pretty clear _no_. “Oh,” Steve says plainly. He’s mad, he realizes, _angry_ , because he _said_ that Bucky would panic if Stark brought up his arm but apparently that didn’t stop him and now Steve’s had to talk his best friend down from shooting Stark in terrified self-defense. “Bucky…”

“What.”

“I don’t– Okay. The thing is, Buck, he thinks your arm is putting you in pain and that he could make a better version that wouldn’t hurt you. He doesn’t want you to be in pain, but that doesn’t mean he was right to do what he did. He shouldn’t–” He stops, curbs his anger and takes a breath. “He shouldn’t have cornered you out here alone. You were right for doing what you did.” That last sentence could be true or not, Steve honestly doesn’t know, but he knows that Bucky can’t be blamed for pulling a gun. Besides, it’s not like Bucky was going to use it, or at least Steve doesn’t think he was; even scared out of his mind, Bucky’s never given any actual indication of violence. The gun was just a scare tactic.

“It’s my arm and he’s not taking it.”

“Okay, Bucky,” Steve agrees. “You get to decide.” Bucky stares at him, like he’s trying to figure out whether or not Steve is being honest, and then puts the gun away after a minute. “How do you feel?” Steve asks. Bucky frowns.

“Bullshit question, Rogers,” he says. “I don’t fucking know.” Steve stops himself from smiling. He’s not patronizing, but the response is so much more in line with Bucky’s usual personality that it’s a bit of a relief to be sworn at.

“You ready to go home?”

“I want my cat.” Steve does smile at that.

“She’s inside,” he says, “probably right where you left her. Let’s go find her.” He stands up and offers a hand out to Bucky. Bucky takes it, not without hesitation, but Steve marvels a little at how different that is from a few weeks ago when Bucky still wouldn’t let Steve even get close to him. He again tenses when Steve opens the door. “You want me to get her, Buck?” Bucky bristles at that, too—he only started letting Steve touch Alpine a few days after Steve touched him for the first time—but then he relaxes, however minisculely.

Bucky shrugs, which Steve knows is probably the closest he’ll get to a _yes_ in this situation.

“I’ll be back,” he promises, and goes to get Alpine. Sure enough, she’s standing where Bucky spent the whole night and she meows when she sees Steve. He crouches down, not totally sure of how to go about picking her up, and clicks his tongue while holding out a hand. She sniffs at his fingers and he pets her head for a few seconds then slips one hand under her and picks her up. She lets out a tiny yowl of complaint and extends her claws, squirming, but doesn’t actually try to jump out of Steve’s arms until they’re back in the hallway.

Bucky mutters something in Russian while Alpine weaves between his legs. Steve’s pretty sure it’s some completely ingenuine insult, because Bucky calls her variations on “idiot cat” more than he calls her by her name. Bucky snaps his fingers once and taps his chest, and Alpine jumps up, clinging to his sweatshirt and letting Bucky get an arm under her.

“Good girl,” Bucky says, still in Russian, but in Russian that Steve knows. He looks up. “Did she scratch you,” he asks, although it comes out as more of a statement. It’s accompanied by the slight Russian accent that Steve’s come to learn means that Bucky’s struggling with words and is probably formulating his sentences in Russian before translating them to speak in English.

“Nope,” he says. “I’m going to grab my jacket and we can leave.”

“It’s fine,” Bucky says harshly.

“Bucky–”

“I can fucking handle it.”

“I know,” Steve says. “Trust me, I know, but if I see Tony right now I’m not going to be able to stop myself from yelling at him, and no one wants that to happen, and I’m not going to leave you here. So I’m going to go get my jacket and we can go.”

“Okay,” Bucky says. He seems willing enough to accept that; Steve would hazard a guess that Bucky’s too worn out to protest. He gets his jacket as promised and nods Sam over to him, then slips out the door again when he sees Tony coming towards him because he really hadn’t been lying when he said that he wanted to avoid making a scene.

Sam opens the door a few moments later and says, “Hey, you guys taking off?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “How long are you around?” Sam shrugs.

“A while. I don’t know, Stark wanted–” and Steve must grimace, although he tries not to, because Sam quickly diverts. “–Talk to me about something.”

“Okay,” Steve says, “let me know when you’re set to leave, huh?”

“You know it.” Sam pulls him into a hug and Steve relaxes into it, hugging back, and Steve pretends he’s not a little bummed when Sam eventually lets go. “It was nice to meet you,” Sam says, turning his attention to Bucky, and Bucky holds up one hand in a small wave.

Sam goes back into Stark’s party and when Bucky manages to get Alpine inside his sweatshirt and nestled on his bent arm, Steve asks, “You all set?” and calls for the elevator when Bucky nods.

Bucky’s quiet and twitchy for the duration of the subway ride home, which is fine. It’s not that different from how he is usually, if Steve is being honest, he’s now just more tense in addition. If anything, it means that people stay away from them, because Bucky’s behavior, the way he carries himself—it’s unsettling, if Steve’s being honest about that too. He doesn’t _mind_ , and it’s certainly not something he’s going to bring up, but the way that Bucky projects himself in public is uncomfortable enough that people instinctively give him space.

They get home without any issues, interpersonal or subway-related, and Bucky goes straight into the kitchen after putting Alpine on the floor, where she stretches and pads over to her food bowl. He hears Bucky turn on the rice cooker and moving around, and he sits down on the couch and turns on the tv for the background noise it usually provides.

“Did you eat,” Bucky asks, having reappeared silently. Steve jumps a little.

“Yeah,” he says, “at Tony’s. Thank you, Buck.” Bucky just stares at him for a minute and then goes back into the kitchen. Steve frowns. He doesn’t know what it is, what’s tipped him off, but he’s pretty sure that something’s different. Not wrong, necessarily, but different.

Bucky comes back a few minutes later and hands a bowl of rice to Steve, then gets his own from the kitchen. He sits down on the floor like he always does and eats and pushes Alpine away half heartedly when she comes over to beg for food. “You had cat food,” Steve understands him saying in Russian, and smiles a little.

“Buck, hey,” Steve says once it’s become apparent that Bucky has finished the rice and doesn’t intend to eat anything else. “Protein.”

“Fuck off,” Bucky says. The words and accent are right, but the cadence is off, the tone too tight. Steve knows that the anger and frustration isn’t directed at him, that being cursed at is just Bucky venting to the closest outlet, so he decides to drop it for the time being. Bucky ate some and he ate unprompted and that’s enough for now. He turns back to the television and pretends to focus. He mostly thinks about Bucky.

Because something is clearly off. Different. Wrong, maybe, he’s not sure yet, but unquestionably different.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “about Stark, he shouldn’t’ve–”

“Stop,” Bucky says, and Steve does without question. “Just fucking– I can take care of my fucking self. Stop.” And that, _that‘s_ new and worrying, but he’s not going to keep prying. Bucky’ll say _shut up_ or _fuck off_ , but Steve thinks this is one of, if not the first time, that Bucky’s outright told him to stop. So he stops.

When another episode of Law & Order starts, Steve brings their bowls into the kitchen, and again nearly jumps out of his skin when Bucky is standing behind him silently. He starts the dishwasher and wipes down the counters and then turns to ask, “Is everything–”

And then he stops, because Bucky is standing inches away and watching Steve like he’s waiting for Steve to either attack him or run, he looks apprehensive and scared and Steve can’t even tell what else, and Steve suddenly feels like he’s walking a tightrope.

“Buck,” he says, whispers, and then Bucky says, “shut _up_ ,” and leans in and kisses him.

He kisses deep and urgent and Steve kisses back because how could he _not_ , his hand comes up to cradle the back of Bucky’s neck as Bucky bites a little at Steve’s lower lip, and then he’s really hit with the weight of what he’s doing and he pulls back, panting.

“Bucky, this is–” He doesn’t get to finish saying what it is, which is okay because fuck, he doesn’t even know. There are a million thoughts racing through his mind and he feels in control of none of them, he feels like he’s back on the thin, thin ice he was during Bucky’s first days back, but now he’s worried that he really did take a wrong step.

“Shut _up_ ,” Bucky cuts him off, almost pleading. “I want to have one thing, Steve, let me have _one fucking thing_ that they didn’t take from me, please.” His voice cracks on the last word. 

“Okay,” Steve says after a second, because he doesn’t think he could ever refuse Bucky, not when he says things like that. “I just– I need to know that this is because you _want_ it, not because you think you have to.” Bucky makes a noise that might be interpreted as a laugh.

“You worry too much, you need to stop,” he says, and then he’s kissing Steve again. His left arm is still loose by his side but his right hand is working under the hem of Steve’s shirt, palming over his abs, and Steve tries not to rut up against Bucky’s thigh like a teenager.

“Not the kitchen,” he says when he finally gets a breath in, “not here.” Bucky does laugh at that—his laugh is different than it used to be, but it’s still _him_ , it’s still his—and he grasps Steve’s shirt to drag him back to the living room. They end up on the couch, Bucky halfway on Steve’s lap, mouth against his while Steve works the button of Bucky’s jeans open. It’s clumsy and awkward and so heavily reminiscent of a dingy tenement in forties Brooklyn that when his eyes are closed, Steve can almost believe that they’re there.

“Hurry up,” Bucky pants, “c’mon, you’re stalling, hurry– _shit_.” The angle is all wrong and it’s drier than is probably comfortable for him but Bucky is undeniably interested and the motions come back to Steve like he did it yesterday, the twist of his hand that gets Bucky arching up and cursing and pulling on Steve’s hair every time that Steve swipes his thumb over the tip of Bucky’s cock.

Steve loses track of the time because it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t care, he could do this for the next forever, and then Bucky is thrusting up into Steve’s fist and says, “Steve, I’m about to–” and that’s as much warning as Steve gets before Bucky is coming over his hand.

“Shit,” Bucky says emphatically and kisses Steve. Steve laughs; he can’t help himself.

“That was–”

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees, “yeah.” And then he says, “Move, your turn.”

“You don’t have to, you know.”

“Steve.” Bucky’s voice is firm and insistent and there’s no way that Bucky’s missed how hard Steve is. He wipes his hand across his shirt, not really caring whether or not it stains, and then pulls Bucky in for another kiss. Bucky does the same for him, gets Steve’s khakis open and works his hand inside Steve’s boxers and gives an experimental stroke. Steve gasps entirely involuntarily, and Bucky grins.

He comes embarrassingly quickly but Bucky doesn’t seem to mind, just pulls his hand off and kisses Steve, then cocks his head a little and shifts off of Steve’s lap.

“That was– You okay?” Steve asks once he’s finally caught his breath. He looks over to Bucky almost apprehensively, and relaxes when he sees Bucky looking comfortable and calm, his head resting on the couch arm.

“Worrywart,” he says and shoves at Steve’s leg with his foot.

“I had to ask.” Bucky’s silent for a while, but he still seems calm and now contemplative, so Steve doesn’t worry too much.

“They tried, once,” Bucky says after a few minutes. “To do– that. I killed him. The tech that tried it. And,” he shrugs, “it didn’t matter. It was just a tech, who fucking cared? He was replaceable and they didn’t warn the next ones, and then someone tried it again, and I killed him too. Snapped their necks, no warning. Four or five people, maybe, before Hydra started warning them, and most of them were scared of me anyways, because I’m fucking insane. And really, it was their fucking fault, thinking they were fucking special enough to try. People didn't want to be near me, which was fucking _smart_ , no one should want to be near me, and sometimes I’d snap and kill one of them anyways. No real reason. But Hydra made them stop trying, because I kept killing them off when they did.”

Steve watches Bucky carefully. The story would make him feel sick to his stomach, and it does, but his priority is on making sure that Bucky is okay in the here and now. And he still seems calm despite everything he just relayed.

“I just wanted something on my terms,” he continues, “and I don’t…remember. I don’t remember this, us, but I know we _did_.”

“Yeah,” Steve says finally, choosing to answer the far less treacherous part of Bucky’s speech, the part that is less of a minefield. “We did. You could’ve gotten any girl you wanted and instead you chose me.” Bucky hums and stretches a little. “Besides, you’re not insane, and _I_ want to be near you. Always have, always will.”

“It’s okay,” Bucky says casually, “the serum couldn’t have fixed all your flaws.” Normally Steve would be stubborn, keep insisting, but it’s the first time he’s heard Bucky make anything that could be considered a joke since 1945 and he’s trying to keep his emotions more or less in check.

“You should lie down in a bed,” he says after another long but comfortable silence. “You’re going to put a crick in your neck.”

Bucky snorts. “Fuckin’ worrywart,” he says again, but he sits up. “Doesn’t mean I’ll sleep.”

“Didn’t say you had to sleep,” Steve argues. “But you should get comfortable.”

Bucky kisses him in lieu of an answer. Steve’ll accept that as good as anything.

(They do, eventually, both end up in Steve’s bed. There’s no lack of space but Bucky curls into Steve anyways, letting Steve hold him. Bucky’s still awake when Steve drifts off, but when he wakes up around one am, Bucky’s snoring lightly and his cat is curled up near his head. He’s peaceful and as physically relaxed as he ever is, which Steve thinks is a bit of a miracle.

He pulls a few strands of hair away from Bucky’s face and kisses the back of his head and goes back to sleep.)


	5. Chapter 5

Bucky wakes up sore and disoriented and with a heavy feeling in his limbs, which, all things considered, is not that different from how he usually wakes up. The difference this time, however, is that he’s on a bed and there’s golden light streaming through the window casting shadows on everything and Steve is snoring softly behind him with one hand cast across Bucky’s lower thigh. There’s no itchy feeling under his skin yet, no need to run tens of miles to feel as in control of his mind as he is his body, so he allows himself to lay there for a few minutes.

A few minutes turn into thirty, and then the cat is bleating because her breakfast is five minutes later than usual, so he drags himself up and puts cat food in the cat dish and turns on the coffee maker. Caffeine does as much for him as any other drug—that is to say, nothing—but it feels almost symbolic; normal people start their mornings with a cup of coffee and so does he. He sticks a slice of bread in the toaster and double checks that all the locks on the doors and windows are still intact and then takes his toast and finds the jar of peanut butter and sits down in the living room. There’s a patch of sunlight across the front of the couch and he sits on the floor, leaning back against the furniture and setting his breakfast on the coffee table.

He’s sore and his eyes hurt from the morning brightness, but he’s comfortable.

Steve shuffles into the living room and smiles when he sees Bucky.

“Sleep okay?” he asks, sounding hopeful. Bucky just stares at him.

“You snore.” Steve laughs.

“I’ll try to keep it down next time,” he says, and Bucky sees regret flash across his face at the phrasing even though Steve does a pretty good job at trying to hide it. He doesn’t add anything after and Bucky watches him as he pours himself a cup of coffee and frowns when Alpine skitters in after him to meow at his feet. “You feed her?”

“What do you think,” Bucky deadpans. “She’s just fat.” Steve laughs again.

“D’you eat?”

“Steve.” Bucky needs him to stop worrying, stop fretting, because so far his morning has gone not-fucking-horribly for once and if Steve doesn’t stop then that’s going to be ruined.

“Sorry,” Steve apologizes genuinely. “I just–”

“I know,” Bucky cuts him off, not wanting to hear it, not wanting to hear any __sorry I try to take care of you, it’s just that I don’t think you can take care of yourself__. Maybe Steve never phrases it like that exactly, but Bucky isn’t so fucked up that he can’t understand the semantics. “I’m telling you not to.”

Steve seems to accept that, thank fucking God, and he sits down on the couch near Bucky. Not next to him, but closer than he would normally sit. Bucky doesn’t flinch. They sit like that for a little while, until Bucky’s coffee mug is empty and Steve takes it and gets up, then returns with a fresh cup.

“So,” Steve starts, and now Bucky does flinch because he knows exactly what’s coming. “Last night–”

“Stop,” Bucky snaps. His voice is harsh and he knows it but can’t stop it. “ _ _Steve__. Stop walking on fucking eggshells like I can’t make my own fucking decisions for myself.”

“…Okay,” Steve relents. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean–”

“I know.”

“Okay,” he repeats. “Let me ask one question, though?” Bucky’s silent to let him continue. “Was last night a one-off…thing?” Bucky stifles a huff and reaches forward to take his coffee mug away from the dumb cat sniffing her nose at it.

“You don’t want that,” he mutters to her.

“I– Oh.” Steve stops when he realizes who Bucky was addressing. Bucky turns enough so Steve can definitely see him roll his eyes, then lunges forward and pulls him into a kiss. Steve kisses back just as eagerly and chases him a little when Bucky pulls away. “Oh,” he repeats, now a little breathless. “So that’s–”

“Do you __want__ it to be a one-off?”

“No,” comes the immediate response, “no, not if you don’t.”

“Then there’s your answer.”

“Oh,” Steve says, sounding ineloquent and very surprised. “Okay. Good to know.”

“Great,” Bucky agrees. “Good to know.” The cat wanders back over and splays out on the floor next to Bucky, and he happily takes the diversion, petting her stomach and muttering about her being a pain when she playfully swats at him for doing so.

He’s still a little groggy from waking up but feels more or less calm. Steve turns on the television and sets the volume a notch above silent because that’s all they need to hear it and anything higher is overwhelming. It’s some reality show that neither of them care about, it just happens to be playing on the same channel that aired Steve's crime procedural the night before. Steve is drawing something and taking the occasional sip from his coffee. Bucky listens to the real housewives of somewhere yell at one another, but it’s not about the show, it’s just uncomfortable for both of them if there’s no background noise.

And that’s what surprises Bucky, what makes him shakily climb to his feet and automatically scan the apartment, visually checking the locks on the door and windows and double checking that everything is where it was the night before and __God__ , how could he be so fucking __stupid__?

It takes a moment for him to become aware of Steve repeating his name worriedly. “Hey,” he says when Bucky turns to look at him. “You okay?” Bucky nods sharply. Probably too sharply for Steve to believe him. “Want to tell me what changed?”

“I can’t,” he forces himself to respond, because how the fuck is he supposed to explain __for one fucking moment I believed that I wasn’t about to be beaten half to death and that thought scared me more than the thought of being beaten__?

“Alright,” Steve says easily. “Come sit with me?” He says it in that same gentle tone that he uses to say __okay?__ whenever he’s unsure of his next step and it makes Bucky tense up all over again, because Steve is still walking on goddamn eggshells. He sits down anyways, stiff and uncomfortable on the couch. Steve stops talking when he sits, just shifts a little to let the cat hop up between the two of them and goes back to his sketchbook. There are little shavings of rubber eraser on the couch. There is a ring on the coffee table because Bucky didn’t bother with a coaster. There is a little bit of cat fur on the side of Steve’s sweatpants from where Alpine brushed against him.

Bucky swallows and turns away from Steve.

“I was comfortable.” Steve puts down his pencil. Bucky isn’t stupid, he can see that Steve’s working hard to stay steady and calm and not startle him. Eggshells. Steve doesn’t speak. “I was comfortable and I haven’t been comfortable since 1943 and it scared the shit out of me. Fuck, Steve, I don’t know–” He swallows again, going silent. Steve picks up his pencil again.

“You know,” he says after a long moment. “I still get mixed up a lot. I write the date and say it’s 1945, and money, with inflation, just–” He shrugs. “Doesn’t make sense. It’s not the same, I know, but the discomfort…I get it.” Bucky forces himself not to snap in response to that because maybe Steve’s being irritating but he’s not going to be a fucking jerk when he can help it.

Besides, at least he’s not comfortable anymore.

They’re silent for long enough that Steve assumes Bucky is done talking—whether he is or not, even Bucky isn’t sure—and asks, “I’m probably going to the grocery store later, ‘s there anything you want?” Bucky shrugs. “You can come with, if you want.”

“Fine,” he agrees, because he doesn’t want to be away from Steve for as long as it would take him to go shopping. And fuck, if that isn’t fucking pathetic he doesn’t know what is, but it remains true regardless, so he relents. “Yeah. Okay. Whatever.”

“…Really?”

“Jesus, do you want me to or not?”

“Only if you want to, yeah.”

“I just said I wanted to.”

“Okay,” Steve relents. He sounds apprehensive. “After lunch?”

Bucky mocks consideration and says, “My schedule’s packed.” He stands up, flicks Steve on the ear, and picks up both cat and coffee before he starts rifling around the kitchen furtively.

Steve’s quiet only lasts so long. “What’re you looking for?”

“Rubber band.” He motions towards himself. “My hair. Driving me fucking insane.” To Bucky’s surprise, Steve doesn’t suggest he cut it.

“Back of the silverware drawer, there should be a few,” he says. “Want me to add those to the list?”

“Fuck, Steve,” Bucky says, finding one and tying his hair back in a ratty ponytail to keep it off his neck. “Do whatever you want, ‘s not like it matters.” Steve frowns.

“Yes, it does,” Steve responds with the persistent tone that means he’s really going to argue this one, the same tone he has when he spends upwards of an hour nagging Bucky to eat or when he’s being especially stubborn about whether or not Bucky’s completely batshit insane.

“It’s just fucking hair, hair ties, whatever, it doesn’t __matter__.”

“Okay,” Steve says, “if you’re sure,” and he drops it after that. Bucky’s thankful—he has no way to explain how it doesn’t matter but he still can’t cut his hair. He can’t even pretend there’s any fucking logic to it. He really is just batshit fucking insane.

The cat’s scurried off to her food bowl and Bucky leaves her be, going into the second bedroom. She’ll either follow when she’s done or she won’t, and Steve probably still won’t pet her without Bucky there. Which he appreciates, kind of, and he at the very least __understands__ because he wouldn’t let Steve pet the cat for months even with him right there.

It feels precarious. Both Steve’s wariness and the overall sense of semi-peacefulness feel precarious, but Bucky’s not going to push at anything he doesn’t fucking need to.

He learned that lesson early on.

He does go to the grocery store with Steve that afternoon, and the fluorescent lights give him a headache and the security guard at the entrance is a joke and he nearly puts a fist (metal or flesh, he isn’t sure) through a rack of produce when the misters turn on without warning.

He eats when they get home and feeds the cat at five pm and he can’t slow his brain down enough to sleep, but he goes and lays next to Steve when Steve goes to bed and Steve doesn’t say anything but the way he kisses Bucky goodnight says enough for both of them.

——

With everything that’s new in the twenty-first century, the fact that it’s an hour long flight from DC to New York should be amongst the least surprising things. That technological advance can be easily accounted for. Steve’s in awe every time he remembers it, but that’s just the way the twenty-first century is, and it shouldn’t be all that outrageous anymore.

But it remains seemingly insane, and even more insane how rarely he sees Sam now, despite their relative proximity. And it’s not like there would’ve been any hesitation to start with—aside from Bucky, Sam is hands down his best friend—but when Sam tells him that he’s in the city for another week and proposes getting lunch, Steve leaps at the opportunity.

Sam’s chosen some chic up-and-coming restaurant near Hudson Square, the type of place that wants to make you feel like it’s a long-time family joint with newspaper clippings on the wall. Sam himself described it as “bougie,” causing Steve to Google the word and laugh out loud at the result. It’s actually pretty nice, he has to admit: it’s not too loud or bright or crowded but not too quiet or dim or empty.

Sam waves to him from a back booth and Steve smiles and makes his way back, sitting down across from him.

“ _ _Steve__ ,” Sam says urgently the second that he’s gotten his coat off. “Stark is in- _ _sane__. Like, totally, completely–” He mimes an explosion gesture. “Man, __what__ is my life right now?!” Steve bursts into laughter.

“Okay,” he says, “so fill me in. I mean, you’re right, but what’d he do now?”

“Self-sustaining solar powered zero emission wingsuit, he’s a __total__ crazy manic genius, there’s __no__ way– damn, Steve.”

“Sounds about right for him,” he says. “Give me the rundown.”

Sam does, and enthusiastically at that. To be honest, it’s refreshing. He’s excited and passionate and gesticulating wildly over the little paper-lined wicker basket of appetizers and every few sentences are interspersed with the likes of “holy shit, Steve!” and thirty minutes later, Steve’s laughing harder than he can remember in years.

“Yeah,” he says, “Stark’s like that. Genius, sure, but off his rocker.” He takes a sip of his Bloody Mary. “What’s the plan for it?” Sam shrugs.

“Depends, really, what happens with SHIELD. I don’t know if they told you this or not, or like, gave __you__ an offer, but the whole avenging thing– they said it’d be nice to have me with them. One of their agents—he’s dead now, I heard—talked to me. Used you as a __total__ ploy, like, ‘work side by side with __the__ Captain America!’. Sounded like an old Army recruitment pitch. But all that was before, you know, everything. So if that’s ever restored, I’ll do that. If not, I’ve got the coolest backpack on the East Coast.” Steve grins.

“You know,” he says, “I’m pretty sure that __was__ a recruitment pitch back in the forties. Coulson, the agent, he was a great guy, but–” he shrugs. “I’m pretty sure any avenging is over.”

“Well,” Sam says, “coolest backpack it is, then. I’ll go find some hang gliders and show off, bring it to VA meetings, who knows. Endless possibilities. I think he mostly wanted to prove that he could make a cooler one than the Air Force could.”

“That’s Stark for you,” Steve agrees, raising his glass jokingly.

“Figures.” Sam tilts his head a little and Steve suddenly feels unbelievably scrutinized. “So how’s it going with you?” Sam asks, “we’ve got a lot to catch up on. He tell you about Stark’s party?”

“No,” Steve says, and frowns. “A lot happened that night. What are __you__ talking about?”

“He said hi to me.” Steve, who’s been aimlessly twirling his straw between his fingers, stops.

“Huh?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “You don’t have to look so alarmed about it. I went to the bathroom and he was just standing in the hallway after. Had his cat with him just curled up in his arm—he __loves__ that thing, by the way, I get what you mean now—and just said hi. I think he wanted to size me up and see if I was a threat, whatever, but he seemed pretty calm about it. Like, tense, but overall calm.”

“Damn,” Steve says, taking it all in. “Wow. That’s– huh.” Sam laughs a little.

“So he's still not talking to other people, then?”

“Nope,” Steve confirms. “It’s me and Alpine and now you.” Sam lets out a low whistle.

“How’s he holding up?” Steve takes a moment to consider.

“You know,” he says, “all in all, he’s probably good. I mean, he’s tense and twitchy and skittish most of the time, sleep and food are still a massive challenge, he’s pretty averse to leaving the house and I don’t know where he goes when he does. None of that __sounds__ good, I know. But, I mean–” He stops, trying to choose his words. “He’s got more of a personality now. He’ll complain about stuff and tell me to fuck off when he wants to be left alone and he doesn’t ask for permission for everything. Okay, he asks for permission __less__ , but less still has to be better, right?”

“Yep,” Sam agrees with a genuine smile across his face. “Damn. Personality is great, and, I mean– I can’t blame him for being frustrated with the whole world all the time. Good job, man.” Steve shrugs.

“I didn’t do anything, really.”

“Steve,” Sam says with a sigh, “you remember what I said early on, way back in October when he’d just shown up? How you were going to have to earn back his trust—not because of anything you’ddone but because of what’d been done __to__ him—and that it was going to be hard because he didn’t have any reason to trust anything?” Steve nods. “Congrats. You made him feel safe, he’s started to trust you, he’s started to have opinions about stuff. That’s __great__. He have a favorite tv show yet?”

Steve laughs and shakes his head. “No,” he says, “but he’ll change it if whatever’s playing for background noise is irritating him.”

“Still progress, man,” Sam says. “I’m not surprised that everything irritates him but it’s a good sign that he’ll try to fix it when he’s irritated.” He sounds so truly proud that Steve can’t help but grin.

“Yeah,” he says, “it’s like– I don’t know, his bad days are less bad?”

“Makes sense. He’s probably reestablishing a reference frame, so the world probably seems less confusing and scary now that he’s gotten more of a handle on how things work now. And you know–” Sam cuts himself off and bites his lip. Steve waits expectantly, and Sam caves after a few moments. “I still think it’s likely he has some sort of brain damage. Electricity plus severe trauma would fuck with him like that. It’d fuck with anyone like that, but the electricity would just kill most people. But if he does, or did, he seems to be doing really well for it. When he said hi to me, he didn’t seem that different from any other new combat vet. Young, scared, angry, desperate. Not good overall but in the grand scheme of things, it could be a lot worse.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “It could. It was. That’s what I try to remember.” He pauses, takes a sip of his drink, and thinks back over the past few weeks. “He’s gotten a lot more cuddly.”

“Cuddly?”

“Yeah. Nestling himself under my arm on the couch, always touching while we’re in bed, that sort of thing.” Sam raises an eyebrow.

“Huh. This is the same guy I met?” Steve smiles a little because he understands Sam’s confusion. Nothing about Bucky, even now, particularly exudes ‘cuddly’. “Well, that’s probably good too, Steve. ‘In bed’ means…?” Steve blushes.

“Sleeping,” he says, “‘cause he still only sleeps either with me right next to him at night or during the day while I keep watch. But you’re not entirely wrong about– something happened between us, I guess, a few nights back.”

“…Okay,” Sam says. “I can’t and won’t tell you what to do, but Steve: I __need__ you to be careful, because if he starts to think that’s something that’s required of him in order for him to earn your care or affection or __anything__ , things will end really, really badly.”

“I know,” Steve says, because he does know and because Sam is using his counselor voice. “It’s on his terms, everything. All of it. Swear.”

“Alright,” Sam says, “just make sure it stays that way.”

Steve nods and forces a smile that might come across as more of a grimace. “Thanks for this, for playing therapist for a bit. Really.”

Sam waves it off. “Not a problem,” he says, “it’s nice to hear about and it’s good for you to talk about and it’s pretty hard for you to talk to anyone else. I mean, I’m on a private flight home in three days, courtesy of Tony fucking Stark, so I don’t have to get a brand new bomb-looking suit through TSA. You have a supposedly dead brainwashing victim recovering in your apartment. Weird fuckin’ version of the world, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees emphatically, “tell me about it. So, three more days?”

Sam launches into another extensive speech about those days. He seems determined to pack as much tourist activity into the time as possible and he enthusiastically tells Steve about all of it, and when he finally finishes, it’s been a healthy two and a half hours.

“Thanks for letting me drag you all the way out here,” Sam says while Steve pays. “It’s out of your territory, but I wanted to try it.”

“I enjoyed it,” Steve says, finding it not to be a lie. “Good choice.” He takes his card back and scratches off a signature on the receipt before exiting. “I can’t make it to DC but you should come visit more often, if you can. It’s nice to see you.” Sam gives him a hug and a clap on the shoulder.

“We'll see how this private plane of Stark’s is and then you won’t be able to get rid of me. Stay in touch, yeah, man?” Steve nods and, after a final goodbye, gets on the subway and heads back home.

All the lights are off when he gets there, which isn’t abnormal. He can see without them and Bucky can too, for that matter. He knows that it slips Bucky’s mind, turning lights on to make it easier to see when it’s not something that’s strictly necessary. Both bedroom doors are closed. He knocks on Bucky’s and gets no response, which is also fairly normal. If Bucky wants to be left alone, he’ll ignore Steve, which is fine. Good, in fact, because that’s him defining a boundary—Steve realizes he’s thinking in Sam’s terms again but he can’t help it after having just seen the guy.

The alternative reason is that Bucky isn’t home, which is also fine, because Bucky can do what he wants. He leaves the apartment two or three times a week and comes back dirty and sweaty and occasionally hurt, but never in dire condition, so Steve doesn’t worry about that either. Bucky can take care of himself, God knows he’s been doing it for long enough.

There’s nothing Steve really has to do, which feels nice. He checks his email on the laptop and reads some more of __The Firm__ , which according to Bruce is the only James Patterson novel worth reading. He draws a few halfhearted sketches of the coffee table as is and dozes on the couch when the sunset hits it in a really nice way right around five pm. He misses eating with Bucky but does so anyways, washes the dishes by hand and then reads some more because the book really is starting to get addictive. It’s nine when he finally puts it down and goes to brush his teeth and then get changed.

He knocks on the door to his own bedroom out of habit and opens it when there’s no response.

His breath stops and he thinks his heart might, too, because the room is all but destroyed from having been ransacked.

——

He didn’t mean to find the file. He didn’t know Rogers even had the file. It makes sense that there was a file in existence, and that Rogers might now have access to it, but he didn’t think he would find it in the very bottom of Steve’s dresser drawer. He’d wanted a sweatshirt.

He’d only wanted a stupid fucking sweatshirt and instead gotten a nine page thick Hydra file on himself and now he’s back in the subway with the cat because if he’d stayed in the apartment then someone was going to get hurt.

He’s good at killing people. He knows this. He was good at killing people as an Army sniper even before Hydra got their hands on him. Despite this, he hasn’t killed anyone in months now, and he wants to keep it that way.

He’s in the depths of the subway tunnels now. Trains go past him and he doesn’t stop moving; he doesn’t think he can stop. He feels like he’s going fucking insane and if he stops moving then– then he doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but whatever it is, he doesn’t want it to.

His head feels fucking scrambled, which is nothing new. His head always feels fucking scrambled. Usually with blank disgust or upset at something or other, or with confusion and fear, and occasionally with anger. He doesn’t know what he feels right now, but whatever he’s feeling, it’s too much. He knows he doesn’t like it.

He doesn’t stop moving.

He takes the turn at DeKalb that’ll lead him to the abandoned station where he lived for most of the time. He doesn’t run, only because the dumb cat is inside his sweatshirt being supported by his left arm and he doesn’t want to jostle her more than is inevitable. He walks quickly, a borderline jog, trying to move faster than his thoughts.

He can’t. Can’t stop thinking. Which is fucking ironic: for seventy years he didn’t have an independent thought and now he can’t stop thinking. He doesn’t know which is better right now.

The subway station is identical as it was when he left it. The service lights are a little dimmer than they used to be, he thinks, or maybe he was just more insane back then. Or maybe he’s just more insane now. He doesn’t fucking know.

The little stupid cat recognizes where they are. From sight or smell or whatever else, he doesn’t know.

He doesn’t fucking __know__.

There is so much he doesn’t know anymore. He’d thought he knew what was happening with Steve, more or less, and now he’s flying blind and not sure if he’s going to plummet to his death or when or how bad it’s going to fucking hurt when the plane crashes. Except that probably won’t even fucking kill him, because that’d be exactly what he deserves and just his fucking luck.

He sits. He doesn’t want to but he knows that he won’t be able to stop himself until he’s out of the city, out of the state, out of the country all because this one stupid manila folder went and shoved him, threw off his careful balance on the thin fucking tightrope he was walking on ever since going back to Steve’s apartment.

There can’t be anything in the folder that is worse than what he’s gone through. He tells himself this because now that he’s taken the folder he has no option but to look through it and he’s not prepared for whatever is inside, regardless of what it may fucking say.

He doesn’t know why. He knows that whatever it says, he’s lived it all, because Hydra wasn’t fucking stupid enough to exaggerate their abuses in a document that may one day be unearthed. Hydra wasn’t fucking stupid at all, and wasn’t that the fucking problem. But he still doesn’t want to read through the fucking folder, and he doesn’t think he has a choice.

He sits down where he used to when he was living there, under one of the maintenance lights. The cat worms her way out of his sweatshirt to go roam. He watches her, because watching a little cat is far more appealing than reading is in the moment, and even though she might be a bit of an idiot she is also innocent and untarnished by him and he can not bring it upon himself to change that.

When she is done with her patrol, she comes and curls up by his side. 

He opens the file and reads.

He learns nothing. It’s all in English, words that he recognizes the shape of as his eyes scan over them but he’s not processing or absorbing or understanding any of them. He’s sure that it was in Russian originally, because everything after the war was in Russian, but he doesn’t know where that copy is or who translated it over. It might still exist somewhere, or it might not. He sits, trying to decipher the English and getting increasingly angry when he can’t, and then realizes what should’ve been an obvious solution from the start. He sticks the dumb cat back into his sweatshirt and lets her squirm around until she’s settled and gets up.

The Stark Tower security guard is the same woman that was on duty when he and Steve went to the Valentine’s Day party, and she smiles warmly when she sees him.

“Mr. Barnes,” she says, “what can I do for you today?” He freezes, because he doesn’t know how to state his request without sounding completely fucking insane, and then he remembers that he is completely fucking insane and says it anyways.

“I have to talk to the computer. The AI, the–” he motions towards the ceiling. “I have to talk to it.”

“Certainly,” the security guard says. She doesn’t sound surprised by the request, and given his experience here previously, Bucky figures that it’s far from the strangest thing she’s encountered. “I assume you’ll want some privacy?” He nods, and she taps something on the little screen in front of her. “Let’s see, I’ll get you away from the office areas — there’s a general purpose room on the 72nd floor, seems to be completely empty, I can go ahead and book it for you if you’d like.”

“I need it to be now.”

“The booking is only so you won’t be interrupted by anyone else looking for some empty space, you can go on up now. I do have to ask you to sign in first, though.” He shakes his head. He may be fucking insane but he’s not stupid enough to leave his name like that, even if Stark’s technological security is ridiculous and the guard will most likely sign him in once he leaves. Still not seeming fazed, the security guard says, “Alright. Elevator D will take you up and JARVIS can direct you from there.”

The room he finds himself in is a bizarre mixture of a corporate kitchen and a conference room and someone’s living room. One wall is lined with a floor to ceiling whiteboard, there's an elaborate looking coffee machine and an excessively sleek refrigerator in the back, and the rest of the room is interspersed with couches and low backed armchairs that are exactly what he’d expect of Stark, or Stark’s designers. The cat wiggles around so he drops her on the ground to let her go explore. He doesn’t take his eyes off her. He doesn’t know, really, if he expected to get this far; is kind of surprised that he has. Hadn’t planned for the next step.

“I need the file,” he says into the empty room, feeling un-fucking-believably ridiculous. He regrets ever having found Steve and ever, in turn, having found that stupid fucking manila folder in the bottom of Steve’s fucking t-shirt drawer that’s now turned everything he knows, knew, had known, on its fucking head. “That Rogers had. On me.”

“Certainly,” says a British voice from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, same as at the party. The cat chirps and Bucky just barely holds back on the instinct to pull a gun, if only because shooting Stark’s ceiling would bring more attention than he can currently handle, and it probably wouldn’t do anything to the computer anyways. “I presume you would like access to a hard copy?”

“I need the original,” he says, “Russian. It was in Russian originally.”

“Yes,” the AI says. “I can obtain a Russian hard copy for you. Is there anything you need or would like redacted from it?”

“No.”

“Is there anything else you’ll be needing today?”

“…No.”

“The hard copy will be in the room immediately to the right of this one. Please feel free to take as much time as you’d like.”

He hesitates before he thanks the AI, still feeling incredibly awkward talking to the air, and then taps his chest. The cat wanders back over to him and she leaps, lets herself be caught midair and cradled against Bucky’s front.

He brings her along while he picks up the papers, sitting in the tray of a copy machine as promised, and then returns to the conference-kitchen-living-room because he doesn’t know what else to do. He hasn’t made up his mind on whether or not he’s returning to Steve’s.

He finds a pen in the top drawer of the filing cabinet next to the whiteboard. He sits on the floor, back to the wall, cat on his shoulder, files in front of him.

The Russian comes easier. He reads. 

What he learns is, ultimately, not much. There’s intermittent behavioral notes and associated warnings from the first ten years of his captivity but those peter out around April of ‘53, and disappear entirely by December. The rest is a list of dates and acronyms that don’t mean anything to him, a few very vague locations, three names that he thinks he should know but doesn’t, and a recipe.

All things considered, there is very little on him, who he was, who he might’ve been.

Understandable, he thinks. He isn’t a person. Is a weapon, a threat, and whatever humanhood he might’ve once had was taken away from him with a shock collar and electrocution and waterboarding and every other form of torture that he’s suddenly aware happened to him but doesn’t truly remember.

The cat winds herself around his ankles and meows, sounding unhappy, and he has to stop himself from pushing it away with his foot. The annoying little cat is the only human thing he has left.

He has options. His mind shifts back to viewing missions and targets and objectives and eliminations– no eliminations. No eliminations, not anymore, he’s not going to fucking eliminate anyone even when it’s the only fucking thing he’s sure of at the moment. He has options, and none of them include killing anyone.

His options include him going back to Steve’s comfortable Brooklyn apartment with food and warmth and clothes and, most importantly, Steve. His other option is to not. His other option is to pick up the annoying cat and leave the tower and go…back to the subway, presumably, because he’s learned he can still get into the Myrtle Ave. station. He knows how to survive without food and warmth and clothes.

He’s gotten too fucking comfortable. Not reliant because he may be stupid but he’s not a completely senseless fucking idiot. But too comfortable.

He could live without Steve but he doesn’t fucking want to.

If he goes back—when, he’s decided, __when__ he goes back—Steve will want to talk about the bedroom he left in chaos and the fucking file and how he fucking feels about fucking all of it.

The cat bleats and knocks her little head into his leg. He sits down. The Beretta’s still at the small of his back and there are still knives in every pocket of his pants. One semi-automatic pistol, 32 rounds of ammunition, four knives. Same as he’s carried since the day after the crash into the Potomac. For some reason, it feels significant now.

The cat’s noises are getting increasingly distressed so he picks her up and holds her to his chest. She grabs onto the sweatshirt with her claws and he moves his left arm for her to rest on. She doesn’t settle; the little idiot is somehow adept at reading whatever cues he puts out when he’s upset and and she doesn’t like it when he is.

The Russian papers sit in front of him, covering up the English ones in that fucking manila folder that displaced everything he’s managed to get a fucking grasp of. He stares at them, scratches the cat’s head absentmindedly.

The file hasn’t jogged anything in the fucking burnt out mess that is his memories. There’s nothing he suddenly remembers or knows; maybe some things he can envision a little clearer, can see happening to something with his face and his body but is not him because he is not, was not human.

They wanted him to be a killing machine, useable, and that’s what he fucking was and fucking machines don’t make fucking memories and he still isn’t anything more than that.

“Jesus,” Bucky says into silence. He drags himself off the floor even though his limbs feel like lead. The cat chirps. “Up,” Bucky says, switching into Russian because it makes his head hurt less than trying to parse out the words in English. It’s not like it matters to the cat. “Time to go.” She stretches, he nudges her with his foot and taps his chest, and she leaps up for him to catch.

He picks up the folder and pets her again when she complains about being jostled. She’s settled inside his sweatshirt, resting on his left arm with enough room for her to stick her head out of the collar, and he slips the folder behind her body, keeping it pressed between the cat and his chest.

“Thanks,” he says into the empty room.

“My pleasure entirely, Mr. Barnes,” says the AI. The voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, still makes his skin crawl.

“Don’t tell anyone. That I was here.”

“Of course not.” He pauses and the AI doesn’t say anything more, so he exits out to the elevator, through the tower and back into the subway.

He’s back on the fire escape a floor down from Steve’s window the next morning when he realizes he has no idea what comes next. Steve will want to talk and then what, then what happens he doesn’t fucking __know__ because he’s never had to fucking do this before because for seventy years, seventy fucking goddamn __years__ he was nothing but a killing machine.

He climbs to the next story because if anyone were to enter the second bedroom of the apartment directly below Steve’s, he’d be seen with no easy way out and that would be too many fucking questions that he’s incapable of answering because he doesn’t fucking know who he __is__.

The paper covering up Steve’s bedroom window — __his__ bedroom window, his window, it’s his window it's his room it’s his — is untouched. The window is relatively easy for him to jimmy open; he doesn’t bother with trying to be quiet because Steve’s hearing will pick it up either way.

He drops the cat inside before she has the chance to squirm and fall and pulls the Beretta out from his waistband before it too can fall as he climbs inside. He holds the gun in his left and takes the folder in his right.

The room is as he left it. He doesn’t stay in it. He shuts the door on the cat when he leaves so the dumb thing doesn’t get hurt. Steve is in the living room and, judging from his position, is waiting for an attack.

Bucky stares at him. Steve stares back.

“…Hi, Buck,” Steve says after a very long minute. He swallows and looks at the gun in Bucky’s hand, and it’s then that it registers to Bucky what he’s holding, really. “I guess we should talk.”

“I’m not going to shoot you,” he says.

“I appreciate not being shot,” Steve replies. A joke, maybe, or maybe not.

“What do you want from me.”

“Nothing, Bucky,” Steve says. Bucky. A name. His name. The name that Steve’s assigned to him.

“I don’t know who I am,” he says, “what you want. You’re not going to get it. Why I’m here.” He doesn’t think his English is making much sense. He doesn’t think Russian would make sense either, if he tried it.

“That’s okay,” Steve says. His voice wavers and Bucky takes a step forward. Steve tenses. There is fear, so much fear, in his eyes, the type of fear that Bucky hasn’t seen since before– he doesn’t know, __fuck__ he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know. Hasn’t seen since before coming back, since defecting, since killing because that’s what he is, all he is, a killer– “It’s okay,” Steve repeats with what’s probably supposed to be a smile, is more of a grimace. “We can figure it out.”

——

The first time Bucky came back and stared blankly at him from across a Starbucks table in seven am autumn chill, Steve panicked. Steve panicked because despite all his preparations, he found himself woefully unprepared. Had absolutely no clue of what to do next or what the right steps would be or what might set Bucky off.

Right now, Bucky is staring blankly at him from across the living room with a semiautomatic pistol in one hand and the folder on himself in the other, and Steve is panicking. He has no clue what to do next or what the right steps would be or what might set Bucky off. And now he’s panicking worse than he did that first time, because the only thing that he’s sure of is that this __is__ his fault. This was entirely preventable, had he read the folder and gotten rid of it– shredded it, burned it, given it back to Natasha for safekeeping, anything except kept it in the apartment.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” Bucky says. Steve tries to dispel it with a joke that falls flat, which is okay because this isn’t a funny situation. This isn’t a situation for jokes but he doesn’t know what it __is__ a situation for and all he has is questions. So he asks.

“Why’d you come back?”

Bucky stares at him like Steve’s speaking a foreign language, one that he doesn’t know. Steve tries to meet his eyes and can’t.

“…I don’t know,” Bucky says, sounding agitated. Steve supposes that's only understandable, entirely fair, but would really rather not continue agitating Bucky when he could avoid it.

“That’s okay,” he’s quick to reassure. “Bucky.” They do make eye contact then, and Bucky looks…every different way at once. Angry and scared and confused and defensive and it really is all Steve’s fault. “I don't know most of what that folder says, Buck. I’ve read it. There’s stuff I can assume. But for the most part, I don’t know what any of it means.” He takes a breath. “And I didn’t ask before, because it wasn’t important. What was important was being here with you, being here __for__ you. And I still am, Bucky, swear to God and whoever else the fuck there is, I am.” He stops, takes another breath, tries not to waver under Bucky’s stare, continues. “But __now__ I have to ask, Bucky, because now it __is__ important, and I need to know.”

“What’re you asking,” Bucky says, monotone, after a very long silence. “What exactly could you be so fucking desperate to know.”

This time it’s Steve’s turn to say, “I don’t know.” Bucky’s grip on the gun shifts, tightens. “I want to know– Jesus, Bucky, __everything__ , I want to know as much as you know, I want to know what you remember because–”

“Because why.” The monotone is putting Steve even more on edge, feeling like with every word he says Bucky moves a little more towards the trigger, and Steve’s not entirely sure whether that’s literal or metaphorical.

He tries to keep his breathing even despite the fact that his heart is beating very quickly. It’s fight adrenaline, he recognizes, but there’s nowhere for it to go, no outlet for it to take, because this isn’t a fight.

“Because it matters.”

“That’s a fucking non-answer,” Bucky says, still devoid of any inflection. “Why.”

“Because it’s __you__ , Bucky!” Steve says, his voice rising now. “Because it’s you and you’re my best fucking friend and God knows that if you had to live through it then I can hear it!”

“So that’s what this is.” The coldness in Bucky’s voice makes Steve tense even more and he immediately misses the monotone. “You want to prove yourself. That you’re a fucking tough guy.”

“ _ _Jesus__ , Bucky. I want to know because it’s clearly still fucking important, and I want to know because how else am I supposed to know what to __do__?!”

“I go. I leave right now, turn and walk out the fucking door, then what the fuck is there for you to do?”

Steve stops and catches his breath. He shrugs.

“Let you go,” he says. “I can’t keep you here. But you go, you leave right now and turn and walk out the fucking door, then you can bet your __ass__ that I’m going to go right the fuck back to finding you. I’ll buddy up with Sam again, talk to Natasha, Stark, whoever it takes because maybe you don’t need me,” and his throat closes a little. He swallows. “Maybe you don’t. Probably you don’t. And that’s okay. But __I__ need you. I need to know that you, wherever you are, that you’re okay.”

Bucky doesn’t respond. Instead, he slaps the folder down on the coffee table, points at the couch, and says, “Sit.”

Steve does. Bucky goes back to staring. After what is most likely a minute but feels like hours, Bucky finally speaks again.

“What do you know already,” he says. “I don’t– I don’t remember things. I don’t have __memories__. I have things I __know__ and I know whether something is true or not, but if it’s not then I can’t tell you what the truth __is__.”

The part of Steve’s brain that is still currently functioning more or less smoothly thinks that makes sense.

“Okay,” Steve says. “I don’t have much I know. Most of it’s speculation.” Bucky waits expectantly. “But I know you were __strong__ , Bucky. They tortured you and you fought back. The stuff in there on noncompliance and insubordination– Bucky, it took them almost __two fucking decades__ to be able to–” He halts, grappling for the words, and then decides that there’s no way around it. No way to soften the blow, and Bucky would probably yell at him if he tried. “–To use you. Because you __wouldn’t let them__.

“The rest…I think they didn’t wipe your memories after every time they sent you out. I think they didn’t always keep you in cryofreeze. I think that they made most of your torture be self-inflicted so that you would have to look to them for…help, I guess. I think that they were proud of what they managed to do.” He’s known all of it, but saying it out loud gives him a sick feeling in his stomach. “I think they didn’t expect you to know how to survive if you escaped, but you did, because you’re stronger than they had ever fucking anticipated, Bucky.”

“You always call me that,” he says. Steve frowns.

“…Yeah. Do you want me to call you something el–”

“You always fucking call me that like you think I don’t __know__! Like you think that one too few means I’m going to starting fucking trying to fucking kill you again.”

“I call you that because it’s __you__! Because you’re the most important goddamn person I have in my life and I need you to know that!”

“That wasn’t my name,” he says. “On the bridge. I knew the word. Didn’t know it was a name. Didn’t have a name. Knew your face. They took that.”

The plain statement, the simpleness of the last sentence, the matter of fact-ness, makes Steve’s throat close up all over again.

“And then I didn’t remember,” he continues. “When I came back. You called me that always and I didn’t remember. Still didn’t have a name. They didn’t take things too often. Just the important memories. Couldn’t let me know too much. Couldn’t do it every time or I’d forget too much. You treat me like a child.”

Steve opens his mouth to disagree, then closes it because Bucky’s not wrong. It’s been unintentional, yes, but he doesn’t think Bucky wants to hear excuses.

“You hold my hand through fucking everything and you never fucking thought to even ask.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you sorry you did it? Or are you just sorry that I’m aware of it. That I’m not afraid to say it.”

“I’m sorry I __did__ it,” Steve says.

“You want to know what happened? Yeah, me fucking too, Steve. I want to know. But I don’t.”

“Okay,” Steve says. And because he’s not going to hold Bucky’s hand, he says, “so now what?”

“So now you find me a goddamn pen so I can try and figure it out.”

Steve ends up in his room—their room? He’s not sure right now—biding his time until…whenever Bucky seeks him out, he guesses. Bucky’s right, which is unsurprising. Bucky being right is a trend that's continued for as long as Steve can remember, all the way back to being two poor grubby kids in a Brooklyn tenement when Bucky’d yell at him for getting out of bed when sick and faint.

He doesn’t know what to do with himself. The laptop is still in the living room, but the laptop usually doesn’t occupy him for more than an hour anyway, unless he’s watching something. He picks up the mystery on his nightstand but it’s not engaging enough to hold his interest against whatever is currently happening in the living room. He rereads the same page three times and retains no information from any of them before he dog-ears the page and puts it back where it came from.

He wants to call Sam, who he saw only– according to the clock despite it seeming impossible– eighteen hours ago. Tell him what happened and ask __how in the everloving fuck do I deal with this one?__ and pretend it’s not his fault in the first place. He doesn’t. He doesn’t because he’s not going to talk about Bucky while Bucky can hear; he refuses to do even the slightest thing that might reduce Bucky’s humanity.

(Although maybe he’s already failed on that front by not just asking what he wanted. What he needed. By tiptoeing around the hard conversations and thinking that if it wasn’t acknowledged then it didn’t have to be.)

The other reason he doesn’t is because what advice is Sam going to offer? This situation is a creature of his own creation and there’s nothing Sam can say that’d be of anything help. Not to mention that he'd just said that Bucky had been doing better.

But Bucky __had__ been doing better. Bucky had been doing probably better than anyone had the right to expect of him, given everything, and then Steve had gone and inadvertently thrown a wrench in his newfound stability.

He tries not to pace and fails miserably. Tries to lie down and clear his thoughts and fails miserably. Picks up the novel again and puts it back down. Minutes drag on.

Somehow enough minutes drag on that he realizes it’s one pm and lunch would probably be good.

Bucky is sitting exactly where Steve left him, which isn’t surprising. Steve pointedly does not stare. All he says is, “You hungry?”

Bucky looks up. “I don’t know.”

He squashes the urge to try to get Bucky to eat regardless. “Okay.” Bucky stares at him like he’s waiting for Steve to add anything else, and he doesn’t; he pulls out what’s left over of his falafel wrap from a few days ago and turns on the oven and then hovers in the kitchen, still not sure what to do.

“I don’t feel hungry,” Bucky says when Steve’s watched six minutes tick by on the digital clock above the stove. “I don’t know because I can’t feel it. Can’t feel hungry or tired.”

That…makes sense, he thinks. It at least explains why both eating and sleeping seem like such chores for Bucky, ones he forgets to do pretty regularly and has to struggle through doing when he remembers. And, well, scraping away someone’s humanity until they forget how to feel hunger, how to feel tiredness– it fits the MO. The first time he’d read the file currently sitting in front of Bucky, he’d nearly been sick at how hard Hydra had worked to keep Bucky as inhuman as possible, and taking away the human—scratch human, __animal__ —instincts of hunger and tiredness certainly seems like it would help do the job.

It makes sense. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t hate it with every ounce of hatred in him.

But Bucky probably hates it more, and this isn’t about him, so he swallows his emotions and keeps staring as the time on the clock changes from 1:08 to 1:09.

He sits at the dining table to eat, which is out of the ordinary but he’s not sure whether Bucky would welcome him sitting on the couch right now, and he’d rather play it safe than sorry. Bucky’s writing something, the papers spread out in front of him with circles and arrows and question marks and Cyrillic, and Steve can see the corner of a Wikipedia page up on the laptop. He eats in silence and then realizes that there’s no little white cat pawing and meowing for him to share.

“What do you want to say,” Bucky says. “Just fucking say it, Steve.” He looks up, startled.

“Huh?”

“You’re making the face you make when you want to say something but you think it’ll set me off and send me into a murderous rampage. Or whatever the fuck your issue is. What do you want to say?” There’s no bite in Bucky’s words, but he’s been speaking in that emotionless monotone since he came back, so Steve’s not sure whether he should be worried or not. He probably should. He is.

“Where’s Alpine?” he asks, because he sincerely doubts that Bucky would’ve ditched the cat that seems to be his lifeline to reality more often than not.

“She’s okay,” Bucky says, which doesn’t actually answer the question. He doesn’t seem inclined to say any more, so Steve lets it rest.

“And I don’t think you're going to go on a murderous rampage,” he adds. Bucky puts down the pen—held in his right hand, Steve notices. Bucky’s always been left handed, even when the nuns tried to beat it out of him with a ruler to the knuckles—and stares at Steve like he might grow an extra head.

Stranger things have happened.

“Then you’re a goddamn idiot,” is what Bucky says, “an idiot who needs to fucking __see__ what’s really in front of you, Steve, not just fucking look, __see__. See the fact that you’ve been living with a fucking murderer for four months. See the fact that being too much of a goddamn hopeful thinker doesn’t mean jack all when you’re dealing with something beyond fucking salvation.”

Steve takes a very deep, calm, controlled breath. (He feels neither calm nor controlled.)

“First of all,” he starts, “you’re not a __what__ , or a __thing__ , Bucky. You’re you. You’re human. And I __do__ see you, I get up every fucking morning and I see my best friend who I didn’t see for damn near a century, and if you think you’re past salvation then you have ano–”

“Shut up,” Bucky snaps, his voice rising again. “Shut the fuck up and fucking __look__!” he yells, gesturing to himself. “I’m a murderer. That’s it. I kill people and that’s what I’m good for and I’m not your fucking friend, and if you __want__ a killer as your friend then that’s your goddamn choice but you don’t get to fucking act like I’m not what I am!”

“Fine!” Steve snaps back. “Okay, so you’re not my friend, fine,” he says, even though the words make his throat close up yet again. “But I’m sure as hell __yours__.” He stops and tries to think, tries to put his words together before he says them, and circled back to their topic from earlier. “You didn’t have a __choice__ , Bucky, it took them a goddamn decade because you fought until you couldn’t because they took fucking __that__ from you too. So yeah, they made you kill people–” He could swear that Bucky relaxes minisculely at Steve’s admission. “–but __you__ , Buck, you’re not a killer.”

“Come here,” Bucky says, leaving no room for argument. Steve doesn’t realize when he stood up but he’s not in his chair now. He makes his way across the room and sits on the floor next to Bucky.

“Look,” Bucky says. “How many murders did you think I’d committed?”

“…At least 25, is what Natasha told me.”

“25 lives. 25 people dead at my hands. __At least__. Guess what, Steve, it’s a lot fucking more than 25. I don’t know how many. This?” He taps the paper. “These are the important ones. The ones where they’d erase my fucking brain after? Keep me from knowing too goddamn much? Keep me from being able to get away? Those were the important ones. They didn’t give a fuck about the others.” He rummages through the papers until he finds one that was originally towards the end, page seven or eight, and slaps it down. There’s two numbers with a question mark after each.

“How many times did they wipe my brain?” he says, tapping the paper with the tip of the pen. “Almost fucking __thirty__ , Steve, and that’s what I’m sure of. That’s almost thirty high level assassinations. Murders that they couldn’t let me keep a fucking memory of because the potentially valuable information. And the rest?” He takes a breath, seemingly trying to calm himself. Steve does the same. “Who knows. Who cared if I killed some sleazebag lowlife politician and they got paid off for it? Didn’t matter. Who knows how many fucking people I killed, Steve, because I sure as hell goddamn don’t.”

“What’s the other number?” Steve asks, because they’re all in now. He nods towards the __31?__ scribbled below the __28?__.

“Cryo,” Bucky says. “Maybe. I don’t know. It was harder to freeze me. Keep me locked up, torture me– it was easier than putting me in and taking me out and having to let me thaw.”

“Oh,” Steve says stupidly. It’s all he can think to say. But the thing is…the thing is that he wants to know. “I wanted to know what happened. All of it, whatever you know, because–”

“Because you’re trying to be all noble and self sacrificing again?”

“Because I want to try and help and I can’t do that if I don’t have a damn clue what I need to help __with__!”

Bucky stares at him for a long moment as if he’s trying to decide whether Steve’s answer was good enough. It probably is what he’s trying to do, Steve thinks, and he has no idea whether it’ll be acceptable.

He must pass by Bucky’s standards because after a long and tense silence, Bucky asks, “Do you remember dying?”

“I remember the emotions,” he says. “Not the sensations.” Bucky levels another dry look which Steve thinks is fair.

“It’s cold,” Bucky says, his voice monotone once more. “And lonely, and scary. Drowning hurts a lot because it’s longer. Electrocution isn’t as bad. Suffocating isn’t as long but it’s painful. There was a lot of water, waterboarding. A lot of electrocuting. Shock collar chained to the wall. Too tight so I choked a lot and triggered by pressure. Couldn’t move or pull. A lot of sleep deprivation. Starvation.” Bucky shrugs. Steve thinks the only thing keeping him from throwing up is his sheer desperation to seem composed. “That was just at first. Science. Ten years to break me,” and he nods towards Steve a little with that. “They got bored. Turned it into a game. Not Pierce, usually, he couldn’t be bothered. Technicians, whoever, they had more fun with it.” Steve swallows again to keep himself from being sick and doesn’t correct Bucky’s use of pronoun. “See what they could do, how long, turn it into a game. I killed some of them.”

“…Bucky,” Steve says very quietly once he’s finally gotten his voice to be somewhat steady.

“I don’t want to hear any-fucking-thing about how that wasn’t my goddamn fault, Steve, or else I __will__ get up and walk out the fucking door and not turn around.” Which, okay, that sounds like Bucky isn’t planning on leaving. Not yet.

“You killed them because they tortured you,” he says. “That’s self defense.”

“I didn’t have a self, Steve,” Bucky states plain as day. Past tense, first person pronoun. A good thing, Steve hopes. “I was made to kill people and that’s it.” 

“Okay,” Steve agrees, “yeah, they tortured you and made you kill people. Bucky, it’s not that I don’t __know__ , it’s that it doesn’t __matter__. Those people matter but you never wanted to kill them and you didn’t have a choice in the matter. They made you kill for them, but __you__ aren’t a killer.”

“You’re a broken fucking record,” Bucky says. “Explain the Army.”

“What, you being a sniper? You were __drafted__ , you didn’t have a choice.”

Bucky takes that in silently and Steve realizes that maybe he doesn’t remember being drafted.

He stays silent for a very long time and Steve doesn’t want to break it. His lunch has gone cold, entirely forgotten about on the table.

“…Is there any other stupid question you want to ask,” Bucky says after a long time. The corners of Steve’s mouth twitch into a smile despite himself.

“No,” Steve says even though he’s sure he’ll think of one soon. “I think that’s it for stupid questions.”

“Great,” Bucky says, “glad we settled that.”

Steve doesn’t see much of Bucky over the next few days. To be more accurate, Steve doesn’t see Bucky at all over the next few days. He hears him at times, coming in or out through the guest bedroom and moving around inside it, but never actually sees him in the apartment.

When he gets out of bed on the morning of February 22, Bucky is sitting on the floor between the couch and coffee table like he never moved.

Steve tries to keep all trepidation out of his voice. “Hi, Bucky,” he says as he goes into the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Bucky holds one hand up in acknowledgment. Steve doesn't go to the Starbucks in the morning as much anymore; instead, he sticks a bagel in the toaster and looks over at Bucky again. “You hungry?” he risks asking. Bucky stares at him for a minute, his expression indiscernible, and then looks back down.

“No,” he says. “Coffee?”

“Sure.” Steve goes to pick up the mug sitting next to Bucky and returns it refilled. “Mind if I sit?”

“It’s your house.” Steve shrugs.

“It’s yours too, if you want it.” His bagel pops up which provides a convenient diversion and he collects his breakfast and sits down on the floor next to Bucky, once again mirroring the way they sat just a few days ago.

“How much do you want to know, Steve?” Bucky asks eventually. He sounds unbelievably exhausted.

“There’s nothing I __don’t__ want to know,” he responds, choosing his words careful. He’s had no lack of time to think about his phrasing over the past few days. “I want to hear whatever you’re ready to tell me.”

Bucky stares at him again, and then picks up a pen. “Okay,” he says. “I don’t know people. I have guesses. I don’t know. I mostly don’t remember. Here,” he says, and points to the first in a column of many dates. “Was the first time they wiped me and every time after until they got to me.” That makes sense; the final date he points to is in ‘52, which would be the almost-ten-years that Natasha said it took for them to break him down. “Until here was small murders. Don’t know how many. Then they froze me in ‘54, I thawed out there.” He points to another date and continues. “More murders. Then right before here would’ve been a big one because they wiped me before they would’ve needed to. I don’t know who I killed then. I couldn’t find anything. Nothing significant.”

“How do you know?” Steve asks before he can think that through.

“How do you know that you’re going to burn yourself when you touch red hot metal? I don’t know how I fucking know, Steve, but I __do__.”

“Okay,” he says. “I didn’t doubt you, I was just won–”

“I need you to stop,” Bucky cuts him off. Steve does, because he can’t ignore Bucky and also because there’s been maybe two or three times that Bucky has outright said he needs something from Steve. “If you want to know then you need to not fucking interrupt because either I say this or I don’t.”

“Okay,” he agrees more quietly than before. Bucky’s voice has gained a bit of tension and Steve’s not going to push, not when Bucky’s already doing more than he could ask for.

“Here,” Bucky says with a heavy exhale, “is when they figured out what worked.” He works his way through the rest of the dates. The pattern seems to be a collection of murders, ending with one significant one—political figures, Steve would guess—before they wiped and put him in the cryofreeze chamber until they needed him again. The pattern stays the same for five decades until the early 2000s. “The cryofreeze didn’t matter anymore,” Bucky says. “If they wiped me, I couldn’t do anything they didn’t want. Didn’t matter if they froze me or not.”

“I have a question,” Steve interjects. Bucky seems done talking about the list of dates and he’s reached the last one, and he doesn’t say anything when Steve speaks. “And you don’t have to answer, but–”

“You’re nannying,” Bucky says, still sounding overwhelmingly tired. “Just ask, Steve. If I don’t want to fucking answer then I won’t.” That's a lie, Steve’s pretty sure, or it’s at least not the truth. He’s pretty sure that Bucky will do whatever he thinks Steve wants him to; that he’ll do whatever he thinks will get him in the least amount of trouble, avoid the most punishment. He’s pretty sure that hasn’t changed since Bucky first showed up, but now isn’t the time to push at that.

“Where’d Alpine come from?”

Bucky almost smiles, which Steve thinks might be the best thing he’s seen in a month.

“She had glass in her paw. Some fucking jackass piece of shit left their broken bottle. She stepped in it.”

“Oh,” Steve says, and now he’s smiling too because that’s exactly the type of thing he would expect Bucky to do. He’s always taken care of things smaller and weaker than him; Steve’s the prime example of it. “How’d you train her?” Bucky frowns.

“Huh?”

“She just jumps up for you to catch when you tap your chest and she rides around in your jackets. I don’t think cats do that without being taught.” Bucky shrugs again.

“That was her only option for getting carried around, she couldn’t walk on her sliced up paw. And when I was at– earlier, where I was, I could lay down a lot. Tapped my chest for the idiot to lay on top of me. She figured it out. I didn’t mean to.”

“She’s a sweet cat,” Steve says.

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees, his voice having gone strange again. “Are we going to keep pretending?”

“Pretending what?” Steve asks, even though he’s pretty sure he already knows the answer and really doesn’t want to get into this again.

“That I’m not a murderer. That you want me here.”

“Bucky,” Steve says. He’s once again working hard to keep his voice calm. “Did you ever __want__ to kill anyone?” Bucky side-eyes him like it might be a trick question.

“…No,” he says.

“You’re not a murderer. They– Jesus, Buck, they __made__ you do what they wanted, they didn’t give you a choice, but you? You’re not a murderer. You found a hurt cat and fixed her up and now she loves you. You haven’t shown a single goddamn sign of __any__ sort of aggression towards anyone since you’ve been here, not that I know of and I’d like to think you’d tell me. They forced you to kill but __you__ are the farthest thing there is from a killer. And you are __un-fucking-belivably__ mistaken if you think there’s a single second where I’m not praising God that you’re here, Buck, because that’s all I want.”

Bucky looks at him and then looks down.

“If I stay, this is the best you're going to get,” he says. “This is it.”

“This is more than I have any fucking right to ask for. You don’t have to stay. Not if you don’t want to. But I hope you do.”

“Who’s John Kennedy?”

Steve’s taken aback by the sudden change in topic but tries not to show it.

“He was a president,” he says, “early sixties, I think? He was assassinated.” And he realizes, the second he says the final word–

“I think that was me,” Bucky says. “It might have been. Sniper shot through the head and back. It was sloppy. They wiped and froze me a day later.”

“…Oh,” Steve says, because what the fuck else __is__ there to say? It’s not like there’s anything of value he could say. “Okay.”

“I think I was in Nepal in the nineties. I couldn’t find anything. They were–” He pauses like he’s trying to keep his composure. “I was in the Ukraine a lot. Based in Russia. Was in Serbia and Kosovo, at one point. None of this makes any fucking sense, Steve. Fucking none of this.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. He reaches out carefully, extends a hand. “I know. We’ll get there.” Bucky doesn’t take his hand, which is okay. Steve thinks the emotions get a lot more complicated when it has to do with his left arm. That’s okay. It’s okay.

Bucky’s head still seems scrambled, bouncing from topic to topic, but he also seems like he’s about to drop, and Steve wonders how much he’s slept recently.

“The closest you got to me was Sèvres, outside of Paris. The Black Widow figured that out.”

“Yeah,” Steve says with a small smile. “She said you’d cleared out by the time she got there.” Bucky gives him a look that Steve’s pretty sure is meant to convey __of course I did, are you stupid?__ and he smiles again. “I’m going to go back to bed,” he says, “come with me?”

“You didn’t eat your bagel,” Bucky says. His tone is different again and– he’s teasing, Steve realizes, prodding at him for always reminding Bucky to eat.

“Bagel’ll be there later,” he says as he stands. He holds out his hand to Bucky so Bucky can take it with his right and pull himself up.

Steve puts the plate and their coffee mugs in the kitchen and when he goes into the bedroom, Bucky is sitting on the bed with his cat laying down next to him.

“You remember what you said a few days ago?” Bucky asks once he’s finally settled.

“Which part? I said a lot. Some of it I probably shouldn’t have.” Bucky sighs.

“You're an idiot, but I want you to know that you’re actually goddamn fucking _stupid_ if you think that I don’t fucking need you, Steve.”

Bucky closes his eyes and lets Steve take his hand. He doesn’t quite fall asleep nor is he fully conscious, but he’s able to rest and that’s good enough.

Thank fucking God.


	6. Chapter 6

Knowing helps.

He doesn’t know everything. Some things are still guesses. Some things he knows until he says them and sees the telltale wince on Steve’s face that means he got it wrong and Steve has to correct him on it. Some things he knows and resolutely decides to never tell Steve about, at least not voluntarily. If Steve asks– he’ll deal with that if it happens.

So knowing helps. Even if some of it is shaky, or a shot in the dark, or like trying to put together a puzzle with half the pieces missing. Knowing helps.

It’s precarious at first. All things are precarious at first, and sometimes for longer. He keeps waiting for Steve to have some sort of fucking epiphany and realize what he’s dealing with, what he’s fucking signed himself up for, and then either put Bucky out or put Bucky down like the feral fucking creature he is.

Neither of those have happened, at least not yet, and it’s been a month since he finally told Steve what he’d apparently been so desperate to know.

Steve knowing what he does might help too.

Things don’t… _change_ , necessarily, but they don’t stay the same. Steve’s still careful but he doesn’t act like Bucky’s quite so breakable. He’s still a fucking nag about food and sleep and, more recently, warmth.

It's understandable, maybe—they’re all things that Bucky has learned to disregard unless they pose a threat, physical cues he hasn’t quite yet relearned—but at least Steve’s stopped acting entirely like Bucky can’t take care of himself. Now Bucky’d be willing to bet he acts like that closer to sixty percent of the time, which is an improvement.

It doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating.

Today, right now, is particularly frustrating, and he can only put part of the blame on Steve. It’s particularly frustrating as he sits on the floor with his left arm on the ottoman as he waits for the metal to cool, not much caring whether or not it’ll leave the fabric singed. Steve is trying and failing to not worry, which Bucky’ll allow this time; he’s not really sure how much time he lost track of or how long his arm was resting on the stove burner without his noticing, which is cause for worry. At least to Steve. He mostly-unintentionally snaps when the worrying turns into fretting, but Steve doesn’t seem to take offense.

His grasp on time is…better now, he thinks. He hasn’t lost track again, at least, but he also hasn’t really been following anything. Time passes and he lets it.

“Hey,” Steve says, breaking Bucky out of his reverie with a concerned tone that means he’s probably repeated himself once or twice or ten goddamn times by now. He stretches out a bit to nudge at Steve’s foot with his own.

“Huh?”

“Can I sit?” Steve asks, nodding to the spot next to Bucky. He shrugs.

“Can’t stop you.”

“Yes you can,” Steve says. “If you don’t want me to–”

“If I didn’t want you to I’d tell you to fuck off. Sit.”

Steve does.

“You know what happened?” he asks. His voice is cautious but not wary. Bucky stares through the floor for a minute because that’s about all he can do right now. Steve’s side is pressed against his own, shoulder and bicep and forearm and t-shirt cotton against Bucky’s bare torso, and he tries to parse out touch, sensation, before he tries to parse out the fucking mess that is his own mind.

“…No,” he says eventually. It’s true, but not quite honest. Maybe it shows (except he knows it doesn’t because his training taught him to withstand any interrogation without cracking. Maybe it wouldn’t work with Steve as the interrogator. He isn’t all that eager to find out.) Steve takes his hand and squeezes.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says. “Just was wondering if you knew.”

Somehow that, one simple fucking sentence, is enough for it to be worth trying to put into fucking words.

“I was…it was nothing. Fine. And I got distracted,” he motions towards his face and hopes that Steve fills in the words he doesn’t want to say, “lost time, put down my arm, couldn’t feel it.” And then, before Steve can say anything sentimental, he continues, “and you’re fucking lucky I didn’t fucking startle and grab you with this arm, you’d burnt _and_ fucked up.”

“Nah,” Steve says easily. “You undersell yourself.”

“Don’t ‘nah’ me, Steve,” he responds. It might have been meant indignantly but it just comes out sounding tired. “Hate to fucking say it, but you’re not fucking immune to my being fucking insane.” And it’s a poor choice of words, maybe, because Steve’s bound to argue with it and he does, but it’s the fucking truth and Bucky sees no point in not saying it.

“Besides,” Steve says after his earnest denial of Bucky’s complete insanity, “if you had burnt me it’d have healed by now, or be well on its way, and it wouldn’t matter.”

“Slippery fucking slope, Steve. A burn doesn’t matter, it’ll heal. And then fucking electrocution burns don’t matter, because they’ll heal, and the water in your fucking lungs doesn’t matter because you’ll cough it up anyways, and the fucking gunshots don’t matter because your body’ll just force the bullet out anyway and short of it hitting a fucking artery or going clear through your skull even that still won’t fucking kill you.” Steve squeezes his hand again, rubs his thumb over the back. “And I’m sorry,” Bucky adds before Steve can say anything else. “And no, it’s not fucking okay and now _you’re_ the insane one for trying to pretend it is.”

“Hey,” Steve says quietly. “Bucky, hey.” He can’t meet Steve’s eyes and hates himself for it. Steve reaches his arm around Bucky and doesn’t flinch away from the metal shoulder, applies just enough pressure for it to be felt. It’s nothing more than a suggestion but Bucky allows himself to be pulled between Steve’s legs, allows Steve to dig his thumbs into his trapezius and pointedly doesn’t think about what happens when it’s injured. Doesn’t think about pain too intense to move the head, doesn’t think about the limited arm motion, doesn’t think about the effectiveness as a disabling technique without long term harm– doesn’t think.

And Steve is still rambling on, something about how “–even if _you_ think it, I don’t, and I know that you won’t _believe_ that but it’s important that I tell you and I hope you know it’s true.”

“Steve,” Bucky says. “Shut up.” Steve laughs a little, in the way that’s less about humor and more about accepting a point being made.

“Okay,” he agrees, “but you still haven’t eaten anything and it’s almost four. Come find something with me?”

“Nag,” Bucky says, but stands up anyway. “I don’t want to hear about dinner in an hour.”

“If you eat a full meal–”

“I don’t wanna hear it, Steve,” he repeats, and Steve lets it go. Probably just for the time being but fuck, he’ll take what he can get.

He does eat, albeit not a full meal, but enough of one to get Steve to shut up about it till tomorrow. He doesn’t miss the way that Steve brushes up against his left arm ever so slightly when he gets the plate for Bucky, nor the way that Steve presses up against his left when he reaches for the remote to put on the mindless background noise show that seems to be running 24/7, and that night when Bucky’s pressing him into the mattress and biting a mark into his neck, he doesn’t miss the way that Steve isn’t shying away from the seam of metal running into flesh as much as he might usually be. If there’s fucking anything he’s certain of, it’s that later Steve’s going to insist on talking about this or at least try to, but for now he’ll settle for kissing Steve before wrapping a hand around his cock and going back to sucking a hickey onto skin. It’s not like Steve’ll manage to get out any coherent words at the moment anyway.

He knows he’ll be lucky if he’s able to sleep for more than an hour or two and doze for the rest, and he’s right: restlessness forces him up and out of bed before three am. He tries to sit on the couch and lasts a total of ten minutes, then nudges the cat away and ignores her complaints to head up to the roof. It’s not hiding, he maintains, if he _could_ be found. It’s not like Steve doesn’t know he comes up here sometimes, and the subway tunnels—both active and abandoned—are too complex for someone to follow him through without his noticing.

So he doesn’t hide. He sits with his back against the extended outer wall of the elevator shaft and stares out blankly, not really thinking. A drunk group of twenty-somethings make their way past all too loudly and fuck, _he’s_ a fucking twenty-something by some definition or another, and he’s here, sitting on a roof out of his fucking mind because he couldn’t lay still instead of being– who knows. A drunk twenty-something idiot.

(He was a drunk twenty-something idiot at one time, but he tries not to dwell on that, because nothing good will come from doing so and he knows it.)

Time passes, presumably. He doesn’t pay attention to it, doesn’t hold onto it in any notable manner, but the sun starts to come up and the noise of traffic, motor and pedestrian, increases. Not by much on the roof of a six-story building, but enough for him to hear and notice. Enough for the shouted _hey, you wanna watch where you’re fuckin’ driving, man? It’s my fuckin’ light!_ to push him over the edge and force himself up off the roof and back down the fire escape to Steve’s apartment. Maybe he can play at being a normal human being for a few hours.

The stupid cat sings her fucking praises when he slinks in through the window and he picks her up with his right hand, muttering to her aimlessly while he sits on the bed in his– his?– in Steve’s second bedroom. He can hear Steve in the bathroom, shower running, debates getting up and joining him and rinsing off the adrenaline and anxiety that forced him up and out of the apartment in the dead of night. He doesn’t; he doesn’t think he can handle any pressurized spray of water being near his face right now, but he hasn’t shaved in a few days and he’s going to start trying to claw the stubble off his jaw if he doesn’t soon.

He doesn’t know if the steam in the bathroom makes it easier to breathe or if it’s placebo, but his chest doesn’t feel as tight anymore. He takes off his shirt, which might be pushing it, and is definitely asking for Steve to make a comment, but the humidity feels better on bare skin. He hums in response when Steve says hello over the sound of falling water and turns on the faucet.

It’s a good thing, he thinks as he lathers up his jaw, that some memories are so ingrained that even the fucking chair couldn’t wipe them out. He couldn’t shave—they would shave him for the muzzle and otherwise couldn’t care less—but at least he never fucking forgot how to.

He remembers scratching, tearing through skin one, two, fuck knows how many times, getting punished for it and–

There’s a razor in his hand and he’s going to fucking cut himself if he’s not fucking careful, so he tries not to remember and just shave his fucking face.

Steve, the stubborn bastard, dries off and then waits until Bucky finishes, rests a hand on his lower back and says, “come with me to get coffee?” He agrees and then learns that, at least this morning, Steve’s definition of getting coffee involves leaving the house to the Starbucks a few blocks down, which is too much other-human interaction to fucking ask of him for at least twelve more hours.

That doesn’t stop him from following Steve, however. Bucky’s unsurprised to learn that he’s still painfully easy to track, but to Steve’s credit, the coffee chain is only two blocks and a turn away and Bucky isn’t exactly trying to hide. Just staying far enough behind that he won’t be seen by or with him.

Fuck knows why it fucking matters.

He waits while Steve orders and trails behind him in the reverse direction to get back to the apartment before Steve does, because for some reason that matters too. He sits on the couch and feigns comfort while Steve opens the front door and goes through the process of take-off-shoes-hang-up-coat-set-down-items.

“Your situational awareness is shit,” he says abruptly. “You’re going to get yourself fucking killed someday.” Steve shrugs and pulls out a pastry from one of the little paper bags.

“I knew you were there. Didn’t see a reason to make a big deal out of it.”

“I could’ve killed you and you wouldn’t’ve seen it fucking coming, Steve.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, his voice with the patient tone that means he thinks it’s a dumb argument but is going to engage it anyway. Bucky wonders absently if he’s always been that fucking transparent. “I knew you were following me, and I knew it was _you_ , and I knew that you don’t pose a threat towards me because you don’t _want_ to. Anyone else, I promise, I wouldn’t have let myself be followed like that, but there was no reason to say anything about you doing it.” Bucky eyes him, trying to decide what to say, because he can’t pretend that his equilibrium wouldn’t have been completely thrown off had Steve said something. “And I mean, you really want to go back to trying to kill me, it’d be nice to give me a heads up first, but I don’t really think I have to worry about you following me to a Starbucks, Buck.”

“You’re an idiot,” Bucky says, falling back on a century-old sentence. He doesn’t know why this is so fucking important to him all of a sudden, but it is, and he’s mildly annoyed (in a way that’s more relief than true annoyance) at Steve’s easy dismantling of his anxiety.

“Yeah,” Steve says, “surprisingly, you’re not the first person to think that. Come here, I got the dark roast you like.”

It’s an easy out of the conversation and an enticing offer, so Bucky does.

The rest of the morning passes without event. He spends most of it reading on the couch with the cat asleep above his shoulder while Steve does something on the laptop and putters around in the bedroom for a bit. There’s nothing Bucky _has_ to do, but the feeling throws him off, so around noon he forces himself up and out on a run. On the sidewalk around city streets like a normal fucking person, because that’s what normal fucking people do and he doesn’t have the patience to slip into the subway tunnels unnoticed.

It works to minimal success. He finds himself huddled in an alley after no more than ten minutes, because the problem with sidewalks being where normal fucking people walk is that there are other fucking people _there_ , and his capacity for dealing with strangers is still nonexistent. The alley isn’t bad; he finds one that doesn’t reek and huddles up on the ground hidden by a car that doesn’t look like it’s been touched in years, biding his time until he can handle running into other people without them automatically turning into targets, threats, something he needs to kill.

He’s home before sunset, which isn’t saying much given the time of year, but is better than it could be.

Steve’s in the kitchen again when he comes in, sautéing something on the stove. Bucky nods his greeting before going into the kitchen and turning on the bath. He waits for it to be on the just-painful side of too hot before he steps in, washing off alley grime and blood from a cut on his leg that he doesn’t remember getting.

He bathes for as long as he can tolerate being in the water and doesn’t bother with drying his hair when he gets out. He ties it back with the elastic that’s now permanently around his wrist, ignoring the water that drips onto the collar of his sweatshirt. The cat comes skittering out of the bedroom to attack his ankles when he walks past and follows him into the kitchen. Steve’s still cooking.

“Hey,” Steve says when he comes in. “Better?” He shrugs.

“I guess, sure.” Not a lie, because the apartment doesn’t feel so claustrophobic anymore, but the lack of anything to do is still off putting.

“You want to eat? Okay, no–” he corrects, “I know you don’t want to eat but you were running around and you didn’t have anything before you left, _what_ do you want to eat?”

“Fuck, Steve, I don’t know.” He nods towards the skillet. “What’s that?”

“Sautéed vegetables. You can have some if you want, but it might–”

“Might make my stomach fucking kill itself, yeah, figures,” he says, because finding food that doesn’t make him sick is still such a fucking _challenge_. “I’m not hungry.” Steve hums noncommittally.

“Okay,” he says. “Are you really not hungry or are you ignoring everything that tells you that you _are_ hungry even though you won’t collapse if you don’t eat right this second?”

“Depends. Were you always this grossly mollycoddling, or you learn that?” Steve hums again.

“Learned it. Spent a lot of time watching my best friend growing up back in the thirties. And I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use that word since then.”

“Yeah, okay,” Bucky says, resigned. He grabs the multipack of deli meats and sliced cheese out of the fridge and holds it up. “This acceptable?”

“Sure,” Steve agrees, “as long as you eat more than two bites, we can call that acceptable.”

“Jerk.”

Steve doesn’t respond to that aside from a mildly amused expression, which Bucky supposes is fair. He forces himself to sit at the table to eat, playing at being a civilized human being the most he can while eating lunch meat out of the package. Steve, thankfully, doesn’t try to have a conversation, and the quiet isn’t bothersome and Bucky isn’t any more uncomfortable than he always is. Food is still complicated and it still drives him crazy; there’s a recipe for a liquid nutritional supplement sitting in the bottom of the file that now lives in the bottom of a box in the back of the closet, and fuck, it’s disgusting and he hated it even when he had no understanding of such a concept, but the fundamental idea is…still easier to fucking swallow than food is on most days.

He doesn’t eat as much as he should, maybe, but more than he would’ve had Steve not made him. He feeds the cat and pets the little fuzzball under the chin when she leans her head into his palm, picks up and puts back a sweatshirt that’s fallen from the pegs near the front door, and stretches out on the couch. The normally dull pain in his back is a bit sharper than most times and he can’t find a position that helps take the pressure off until Steve is stretched out behind him, Bucky resting against his back and between his legs. The cat comes over and lays down at his feet to groom her face furiously and Steve wraps an arm around Bucky’s torso, not constraining but just comfortable.

“Today was good, Buck,” Steve says with a kiss to the back of his head. Bucky feels him exhale slightly against his neck. “And I know I’m about to ruin it but just hear me out, okay?” Bucky tenses because there’s no way he _couldn’t_ , hearing that. “I think…” he starts, “that you undersell yourself a lot. And your self control. And I know that you are not violent and I know that you never wanted to be. And I just think– I mean– look, you told me that when you found Alpine–”

“Is this about me or is this about my fucking cat Steve because if it’s about the fucking cat then you can say it to her and if not then just fucking say it,” he snaps before he can help it, no thought no pauses just word after word because he couldn’t fucking say it if he stopped to fucking think about it.

“I think you should let Stark take a look at your arm,” Steve says, and Bucky sits upright and tenses so much that it feels like his tendons might be made of fucking steel. “I think your arm hurts you a lot and I think you don’t even really realize it and I think that Stark could–”

“Make one that’s not a fifties Nazi holdover piece of shit weapon, yeah.”

“…Yeah,” Steve agrees. “That’s basically it. Look, I’m not– I don’t expect an answer now, okay? Or any time soon. Just– just think it over, okay?”

“Fuck,” he answers.

It’s not like he’ll be able to think of much fucking else now.

——

The thing about touchstones for most people, Steve thinks, is that they’re just…there. Inane, everyday things. Things that don’t really add to a room but would detract if they _weren’t_ there, things that might seem average and unimportant but aren’t really. Baseball is a touchstone for him; the game hasn’t changed even though the Dodgers up and moved to California, and the commentators’ enthusiasm sounds the same decades later. It’s something he enjoys and turns to when it’s on the tv even if the game isn’t live, it’s something that’s constant and life wouldn’t be unmanageable if he didn’t have it, but it wouldn’t be the same.

But when it comes to Bucky, it’s…different. Harder. More complicated. Because he knows Bucky can never really trust the world around him. Because Bucky can’t take things for granted the way Steve can. The world is touchstone upon touchstone, and without those, without his coffee and books and _Nova_ and Alpine and, admittedly, Steve, the reality of the world starts to shift. Crumble. Like if he doesn’t have the pillars of what he knows to be real and true then he can’t trust that he has anything else, either.

And if he wants to stretch it even further, the thing about touchstones is that they can be touched. The ballgame is there on the tv and he can see it and know it’s happening, even in a different timezone. But all of– nearly all of– Bucky’s touchstones are literal. Tactile things he can feel beneath his hand. Steve doesn’t know if that’s intentional, but he also doesn’t think it’s entirely coincidental. That if Bucky’s having a bad day then Alpine is clingy and his coffee is always hot enough to feel though the mug and that there’s a good chance that he’ll end up dragging Steve back to bed by midafternoon, because as far as it goes, sex is a very good touchstone. Selfish as it may be, Steve doesn’t want Bucky to give that one up, and doesn’t think he’s going to. All things considered, a warm body to touch and be touched by is a very good indication that yeah, everything around and including Bucky is real and not about to go anywhere.

And if he _really_ wants to stretch it, Bucky can only actually touch things and _feel_ them with one hand, and Steve can’t help but wonder if that makes the world only feel half as real. Which might be, and probably is, a bit maudlin, but he’s thought it regardless.

Bucky’s initial reaction to him asking was frankly better than Steve had counted on. He’s not sure what he had been expecting, but all things considered, Bucky going tense and quiet and twitchy is not the worst that could’ve happened. He takes that as a good sign and tries not to dwell on it.

It’s not like there would’ve been a way to ask the question that _wouldn’t_ have completely thrown off Bucky’s equilibrium. He just hopes it doesn’t last for long, because it’s better if both of their equilibriums stay as balanced as possible. Otherwise—and he’s learned this part the hard way—it leads to a lot of stress and tangled emotions and undue frustrations and is just all around safer to avoid.

It doesn’t take very long for Steve to realize that his hopes are a bit of a stretch. Bucky doesn’t sleep the first night, the night when Steve brings the whole topic up. Steve hopes it’s coincidence that Bucky’s insomnia hits hard on that same night but knows it's not. If there’s anything to keep a guy awake and thinking, well—Steve supposes that could do the trick. And there’s nothing outstandingly off about Bucky’s behavior the next day either. Still tense and twitchy, sure, but there’s a chance of that whether or not he sleeps, if he does, depending on what nightmares it drags up.

He doesn’t sleep the second night either, or so Steve assumes. He’s not in the bed next to Steve, not on the floor between the bed and wall where he’ll sleep if he feels like the window is a threat, and Steve knows that he still won’t sleep unless there’s someone else in the room. Bucky leaves the apartment at some point between Steve falling asleep and waking around three to get a glass of water and is back before he reawakens at seven.

Still tired, still twitchy, still very clearly stressed and agitated and struggling with what Steve’d offered.

Still all reasonable and expected responses. Still shitty.

It’s not until the third day Bucky goes without sleep that Steve starts to get worried. Steve’s got a pretty solid daily schedule set out for himself and there’s no reason _not_ to stick to a 24 hour day like the rest of the world, but it takes about twice that for Steve to start feeling tired the way a normal person would. Nothing good happens when he pushes past that point of tiredness, so he doesn’t. From what he can tell, Bucky is the same, just worse at noticing when he’s feeling the same tiredness, because tiredness was never something he would’ve had to…take into account while with Hydra. Same way that food, hunger, wasn’t relevant; eat when fed, sleep when instructed.

“You know you’re yawning?” Steve asks on that third day when Bucky’s stretched out on the couch, one leg over the end and bouncing the other rapidly. Bucky levels him a look. “Just asking, sometimes you don’t. Tired?”

“Maybe,” Bucky says, tone unsure and noncommittal.

“You eaten today?”

“Mm.” Bucky reaches up and pets the cat curled up on the back of the couch. “Not really.” Which is a no, Steve knows, making this the second day that Bucky’s gone without any food in addition to any sleep.

“Have dinner with me?” Steve asks. “Something simple?”

“Maybe,” Bucky repeats. “Coffee earlier.”

“Yeah,” Steve acknowledges, well aware that coffee’s the only thing Bucky’s has for a few days now. “You know, your stomach isn’t going to be very happy with you if you try to live off coffee alone.”

“My stomach fucking hates me regardless, Steve, it doesn’t matter.”

“Okay, so you can eat some noodles if I make them.”

Bucky shifts and stretches his previously-bouncing leg to shove at Steve.

“Jerk,” he says.

“Sure,” Steve agrees, “you want anything other than pasta?” Bucky shakes his head. “Okay. Be back in a few, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Okay.”

Steve ends up taking longer than he intends, in part because he remembers a few other things they need right before he goes to check out, and because he ends up talking to the cashier about the HBO show he recommended Steve watch. 

In all, it’s thirty minutes before Steve is back upstairs, unloaded the groceries and tucked the bag into a drawer. Bucky isn’t where he was when Steve left, which is neither surprising nor notable, but Steve doesn’t really worry until it seems that Bucky’s nowhere in the apartment. He doesn’t tend to leave unless there’s something forcing him out of the house and he was more or less fine when Steve left.

Still, he doesn’t think much of it, and lets it be until he goes to change out of his jacket into the sweatshirt he usually wears around the house and spots Bucky sitting on the floor between the wall and bed, knife in hand, looking puzzled.

“Hey,” Steve says when he’s done changing, trying to keep his tone calm and even. Bucky hasn’t sought out this specific spot for a while, and Steve's not sure what to make of the knife he’s holding. It appears to be more for comfort than purpose—Steve suspects that's what most of the knives Bucky carries at this point are for—but that in and of itself is not entirely reassuring. “Buck?”

“I’m fine,” Bucky says, even though it’s pretty clear he’s not. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m me.”

“Okay,” Steve says, because that answers the question he always feels weird about asking. He sits on the floor a few feet across from Bucky, fat enough that he’s not crowded but still within reach. “What happened?” Bucky glances up, meets his eyes, and goes back to staring through the floor. His grip on the knife tightens ever so slightly.

“When I was,” he starts. “Early on– It didn’t work that well. Yet. They didn’t know what they were doing. And they got rid of everything.” He motions towards his head. “Didn’t mean to but couldn’t fucking– couldn’t target areas yet. For specific things. So I lost it all.

“And it made it easier. For them. They didn’t have to try to…overwrite stuff, when there was nothing there. Nothing, didn’t know language, didn’t know fuck all. Like a fucking child. And it’s– easier, when you can build from the fucking ground up. Learned Russian before English. Wanted a perfect fucking weapon. And if you can’t get one then you can make one yourself.”

“You’re not a weapon, Bucky,” Steve says when he’s finished speaking. “And you’re not an object. Weapon or not, you’re not an object.” Bucky cocks his head.

“I was uncontrollable, Steve,” he says. His voice is quiet and tense and very carefully controlled. “I would kill techs at random and they couldn’t fucking sedate me because I’d just burn through the drugs and it’s not like anyone fucking wanted to get close enough anyway and if I was lucky they’d fire warning shots and if I wasn’t then they’d shoot me. And they still couldn’t get me to do what they wanted.”

“You were defending yourself, Buck. They were going to hurt you and you stopped them. Because you’re strong and stubborn and _human_ and you _still_ made your own choices for yourself.”

“Hypocrite,” Bucky says, which Steve will allow. “And I didn’t get to _have_ fucking choices. Either I did what they told me or I got shot, or wiped, or frozen.” Steve opens his mouth to respond, but Bucky holds up a finger. “Just– if you want to hear me talk about this then you have to let me fucking say it.”

“Okay,” Steve says softly. “I’m listening.”

“And if I let Stark– Tony– look at my arm. If it reminds me or sends me fucking careening back there, I don’t know that I can get out of there without losing it. Going fucking crazy, trying to kill him, making you shoot me. And yeah, you’d have to shoot me to get me to stop. And your friend is fucking stupid for even volunteering to take that big a fucking risk in the first place. And that’s all. I don’t want to kill your friend but if it fucks with me then I don’t know what I can help.”

“Bucky,” Steve says quietly. “Buck, I know what you’re saying. And I think you’re selling yourself short again. Okay, you didn’t used to have choices, but you do now, and not _once_ have I seen you get remotely violent. Don't look at me like that– when have you gotten violent? Even when you don’t have a clue where or who you are, or who _I_ am, or why either of us are here, you’re not violent. And you _chose_ that and every single day you choose it again, Bucky.”

“Steve–”

“Hey, my turn, alright? I know you don’t choose to lose track of stuff and I know you fucking hate it every single time it happens, but you’re also an idiot if you think I won’t be with you the entire time. Fact of the matter is, Buck, I think you won’t hurt anyone because you don’t _want_ to. I think– okay, worst case scenario, Buck? I think if anything were to go wrong, the worst you would do is try to scare people away. That’s all. No permanent harm, nothing. And for what it’s worth– Tony understands what it’s like when…personal choice isn’t an option. Not something that exists. Or applies.”

“It’s a bad fucking idea, Steve,” Bucky says, sounding more exhausted than anything else. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“I know,” Steve says, “and you haven’t, and you won’t, and _yes_ I fully believe that no matter how skeptical you look. Let me work out logistical stuff and if they have any questions they need answered then I can ask and if not then you don’t have to worry about it, alright?”

“Bad idea,” Bucky repeats. “Sure. Fine. Hey, if you have to shoot me to get me in line, at least I warned you first.”

Steve tries to keep from reacting to that and, judging by the warped amusement on Bucky’s face, fails. “Not gonna happen. Come feed your cat and I’ll make dinner.”

“Okay,” Bucky says. “Sure. What’s the fucking harm.”

Steve doesn’t have an answer to that, but Bucky manages to sleep for more than an hour that night, so Steve figures that whatever the harm, it’s outweighed by the good.

He talks to Stark a week or so later.

It’s strange how much Stark is like his father while still being so different. As if Tony went out of his way to avoid all of Howard’s shortcomings and compensated by overdoing it with everything else. Steve wonders if Tony knows how alike they are—it’s not like Howard was a particularly hands-on father, especially not when it came to including Tony on his projects—but they could be interchangeable when it comes to shared displays of manic energy and unquestionable hubris.

“So that’s really all there is to it, and if you have a tape measure at home– you probably do, do you sew? Is that a thing that you do?– just measure, the more precise the better, millimeters would be great, actually what would be _really_ great is if I could talk to him for, hm, five minutes? Ten at the max. Ask a few questions, do a quick measurement, let you two get on with your day, easy peasy.”

“Ah,” Steve says, unsure. “What questions? I told him that I could just kind of…pass along anything. I mean, I can _ask_ if he wouldn’t mind coming by, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Ask,” Stark says, “and for you in the meantime, how do _you_ think we should go about this?”

He has to stop and think, because for all the consideration that he’s put into it, he doesn’t actually know how to just state it.

“I think,” he starts, “the less medical a procedure we can make it, the better. They…experimented on him, and the less that it resembles that…” Tony openly grimaces.

“Jesus fuck,” he says, which Steve finds pretty accurate. “Okay. I’m still going to suggest we do it here, because there’s probably no room we could do it in at your place that wouldn’t permanently fuck up its associations, but a guest suite here? Looks just like a normal hotel suite except better, could still have everything I need, definitely doesn’t look like this–” and he waves around again because it’s impossible for him to speak without gesticulating. “–And you can just take off when you’re ready and never have to come back if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, “that could work. Probably. As long as it’s more ‘hotel room’ than ‘safehouse’.” Tony gives him a slightly incredulous look.

“They're _nice_ rooms, Rogers,” he says.

“Okay, so that might work. I don’t even know how medical of a procedure it would be–”

“He shouldn’t feel it,” Tony’s quick to reassure. “ _Might_ feel some pressure when I try to fit things into place, but he shouldn’t actually feel me replacing it. Speaking of replacing it, there is the question of who should actually _do_ it. I mean, I’ll build the thing, and I know the diagrams for the original are in that file which I’m going to ask you to ask him to let me ask JARVIS to look at, but when it comes down to who actually replaces it, there’s options.

“There’s me,” he says, “which might be obvious, but frankly, I’m not good with squishy things. Human bodies included. I can build the arm just fine and I mean, it’ll just be going into the socket and not his actual skin, and if it’s someone else then I’m going to be there to make sure they don’t fuck it up, but I might not be your first choice. He’s still legally dead, no?” Steve nods. “So we can’t really bring an outside party in, which is fine, because I think we’d all hate that. So of the people that know he’s alive and who I trust to do this, we have me, Banner, Jane Foster, Thor’s not-a-girlfriend? There’s her, and there’s Ross– Betty, not the other one– and Helen Cho. Who is actually pretty fucking hard to get in contact with, smart as hell, but not who I would suggest for this one.”

“…Okay,” Steve says, “Banner? Wouldn't this be too…” He waves in a way that he definitely picked up from Tony, dammit.

“Mm,” Tony says, “like, think he’d Hulk up? Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that. I mean, it’s intense, sure, but nothing that would make him go apeshit. Hulk-shit. You know?”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees while Tony looks pleased by his own joke. “I know.”

“And again, him, Foster, Ross, all completely genius. Banner has like, five PhD.s, but he’s a physics guy, and so’s Foster. Ross’s thing is biology. So if I had to choose, I’d choose me and Ross, me to do the actual replacement and her to make sure that nothing is going wrong. Which it _won’t_ , but it’d probably be safer to have her there than not. And if something does go wrong–”

“If something goes wrong, let me handle it,” Steve says, hoping the urgency in his voice is conveyed. “He pointed that gun at you a few months ago cause you were a perceived threat he was trying to scare off. Now you’re a legitimate threat and he has to take it on good faith that you won’t hurt him. And, look, his self control is good. Pretty damn incredible, to be honest. But if something starts to look like it even _might_ be going wrong, you tell me so I can handle it and no one will get shot or stabbed or otherwise wounded. Okay?”

“I had it under control,” Stark says, “I could’ve handled it.”

“No,” Steve argues, frustration mounting. “ _Listen_ to me, I will handle it if anything starts to go wrong because he’s not going to shoot me or stab me or snap my neck and if he does I can recover from all of that and you and Ross _can’t_ and he doesn’t trust you guys because he doesn’t trust anyone. If anything even starts to look like it could go wrong then you tell me and you listen to what I have to say because I can talk to him if I have to. Okay?”

“You can recover from getting your neck broken?”

“Tony.”

“Right,” he dismisses, “So, guest suite, does he want to meet me and Ross first? Text him, ask. I can do it in, what, a week after I get exact measurements? And his permission to look at his file? I mean I know _how_ to build it but need that to take a look at whatever attachment mechanism there is.”

“Hold on,” Steve says. He pulls out his cell phone and sends a brief message that may or may not get read, since Bucky’s relationship with modern technology goes about as far as changing the television channel and reading wiki articles on the laptop. The cell phone sits mostly unused on the side table in the master bedroom, and isn’t much more than a text-messenger when he does use it. “Okay. Asked him to come by, dunno if he will.”

“Perfect,” Stark says.

“Is it going to be a problem?” Steve asks before he fully thinks through the question. Tony looks briefly taken aback.

“What? About the party?” He waves it off. “You know, when I got back from Afghanistan, I kept trying to put my fist through Pepper’s head while I slept. Called the suit up and everything without waking up. Nightmares non-fucking-stop, was more comfortable sleeping on the floor than in a bed, whole bunch of shit. Jamey was the only one who kept me from going completely off the rails.” Steve frowns, registers Jamey as James Rhodes, and tries to reconcile the nickname with the man that Steve knows as the Air Force officer. “So,” Tony barrels ahead, “no, it’s not a problem. I mean it would’ve been nicer if he _hadn’t_ pulled a gun on me, but I built fuckin’ ten Iron Man suits to make myself invincible when I got home.”

“…Thank you,” Steve says, because the sentiment is clear despite Tony’s slight rambling. Then, because he looks around the room and remembers just how poorly Bucky and laboratories go together, says, “Is there anywhere else a little less workshop-y?”

“Mm, for you? Yes. I, however, am staying here. Really, have JARVIS take you anywhere, he can just direct your guy over to you if he shows up. Does coffee do anything for you? There’s a café spot a few floors up, what floor’s that on, J?”

“That, sir, is on the 44th level, below you,” JARVIS says, and Steve, despite knowing of the existence and function of the AI, jumps. Then, as he processes the tone of the polite British voice, wonders just how much of an independent personality JARVIS has, because if Steve didn’t know better he’d think that the AI sounds amused.

“44th floor,” Stark repeats. “Or wherever you want, have JARVIS let me know where you end up and if your Bucky–”

“He’s not _my_ Bucky.”

“–Comes by I can meet you there,” he continues as if Steve hadn’t interrupted at all.

“Alright,” Steve agrees, “I’ll give him a few hours and say bye before I take off.”

“Wonderful,” Stark says with the tone of someone who’s very much looking forward to their privacy, which makes Steve wonder what exactly it was Stark was working on before he arrived. “And hey, before you take off, see that wrench-looking thing there? No, the next table over. Hand me that first?”

Steve does, and lets JARVIS take him to Tony’s aforementioned café spot.

It’s actually a pretty nice place to hang out, one that Steve didn’t know of previously. It’s not the type of place that he’d decide to go, but the type where he could see himself ending up for a while if he was in the area. It’s empty, which is an additional comfort for if and when Bucky does show up.

He swipes through the truly excessive number of drink options on one of the touchscreen automatic drink machines before sticking with straight coffee. There’s a good number of books scattered about the various tables, most of them novels; Steve takes a seat in one of the armchairs across from the coffee bar and picks up one that he recognizes from one of the “ten best books of the past ten years” lists that he browsed. The blurb on the back describes a father and son post-apocalypse and he might’ve put it back down except for the fact that the idea, in its abstract, is comforting.

He’s just over thirty pages in when he feels the air in the room shift slightly, imperceptibly to anyone else, and given that he would’ve heard anyone other than Bucky approaching, he doesn’t look up before he says hello.

“Hi,” Bucky says back, and Steve can tell from intonation alone just how tense he is. He pulls out his phone and writes down the author so he can check the book out later to finish, then stands up.

“You know you’re being all quiet when you move?” Steve asks.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, “not like I can fucking help it.”

“Okay,” Steve says, “hey, just asking. You don’t always.” The eerily silent motions, like so much else, seem to be a constant that crops up whenever Bucky is more anxious or stressed or thrown off than usual. Day to day he’ll make noise without bothering to mute himself, but when he’s under pressure, the possibility won’t even cross his mind.

“Yeah,” Bucky says again. “What’m I doing here, Steve.”

“Stark wants to talk to you, in person. Just a few questions, he says it’ll be better than if I pass on the info. And he wants to measure your arm, I think.” Steve watches Bucky’s jaw tighten. “We can go home,” he adds on. “This doesn't have to happen today, Bucky.”

“No,” he agrees, “but it’ll have to fucking happen at some point, at least now I don't have to get myself all fucking worked up over this for days.”

“Okay,” Steve says. He lays a hand on Bucky’s arm, the right one. “Hey. It’ll be fine. I’m right here. Okay?” Bucky hums his assent and Steve sends a text to Stark, since right now Steve thinks that JARVIS would– well, it would probably freak the fuck out of Bucky, and the sooner and smoother they can get this over with, the better.

Stark’s entrance is the opposite of Bucky’s: he’s audible from the hallway and walks in with a mock salute.

“Captain, my captain!” he says with far too much enthusiasm.

“You’ve used that one before,” Steve retorts dryly, figuring that there probably wasn’t a lot of banter in whatever Hydra lab Bucky was held in. Bucky, already tenser than before, raises an eyebrow.

“But it’s a good one,” Stark combats, “and Barnes, you’re looking good.” He doesn’t extend his hand to shake which, even if it doesn’t put Bucky at ease, doesn’t make his tension shoot back up. Visibly, at least. “Here’s the deal– quick few questions, super quick measurement around your arm, elbow, wrist, and wrist to middle finger, ten minutes max and you can be on your way. You want coffee? There’s coffee.” Bucky shakes his head. “Suit yourself. Questions first or measuring first?” Bucky looks to Steve. It’s not something he feels entirely comfortable with—he wants Bucky to have as much agency as possible, especially when it comes to this—but he’s not necessarily surprised by Bucky’s deferral. He tries to choose correctly because he knows that Bucky’ll accept whichever he says, even if he doesn’t want it.

“Questions, Buck?” He nods.

“Okay!” Stark says, maybe a little concerningly eager. Steve gives him a look that he very much hopes conveys _take it down a notch or ten before you make him panic_. Stark, to his benefit, either picks up on Steve’s unspoken request or reins it in himself. “Most of it, really, is about appearance, you’ve got a lot of options. Entirely up to you. You know a more traditional prosthetic, what most people would have now? Could make it look like that just better, mechanically I mean–might look a little bulkier but construction-wise, easy. Could make it look just like your other arm, just flesh, with a few allowances for joints. There’s what you’ve got now, red star excluded, I assume. Or not, hey, your decision. Or anything else you can come up with, really.”

Bucky eyes Steve without turning away from Stark. Steve shrugs. This isn’t a question that he can answer for Bucky.

“…Like this,” Bucky says after a long moment, his voice quiet and very strained.

“One you’ve got now, no star?” Stark confirms, and Bucky nods.

“Perfecto. I know there’s a diagram of it that Romanova managed to dig up. I haven’t seen it, that’s what I want to ask your permission for; I know it’s pneumatic but not much more than that and getting to look at the attachment mechanism would be ideal.” Bucky nods again. “Per- _fect_ -o. Last question, what’s the pressure like with that one?” Bucky stares at Stark blankly. “How sensitive is it? Like, when you close your fingers?” Bucky extends his hand slightly and makes a fist. Stark hums.

“Precision-wise? Consistency?” Bucky looks over to Steve again.

“Neither are very good,” Steve volunteers, a little hesitant. “It’s like it’s got…settings, and will adjust to whichever’s closest to what he tells it.”

“Sound right?” Stark asks. A third nod comes from Bucky. “Wonderful– well, not wonderful, actually that sounds like it would fucking suck, but what’s wonderful is that that means you are done answering my questions. Up for a quick measurement?” Stark holds up a tape measure, the type that Steve remembers seeing in his mother’s darning kit. Bucky looks to Steve, who still tries to keep anything from showing too clearly because this is Bucky’s decision, and nods to Tony. “Great, hold your arm out a bit? Palm flat? Just like that.”

For a few very quick measurements, it seems much longer than the amount of time it takes Tony. It takes long enough that Bucky has the opportunity to turn back to Steve, looking puzzled.

“‘Captain’?” Bucky says very quietly. “You still not telling people about that one?”

“Oh jeez,” Steve says eloquently.

Tony looks up. “Oh jeez?” he repeats, pausing from reading off measurements to his AI. “You’re worse than my father, Rogers. What isn’t he sharing with the class, Barnes?”

“Captain America,” Bucky says, and Steve thinks he might leave it at that. “Captain _America_ is a captain and a character. _He_ –” Bucky jerks his head towards Steve slightly. “–is a private.”

Tony looks absolutely gleeful at learning this information.

“First class,” Steve emphasizes, as if it’ll save him any dignity.

“You are a _private_ ,” Stark repeats, sounding thrilled, and then says another number into the air.

“Your German scientist sounds less criminally negligent for experimenting on a Captain Rogers than a PFC Rogers,” Bucky mutters. It’s barely audible to Steve and from Stark’s lack of reaction, he doesn’t hear, despite being closer to Bucky.

“It wasn’t _that_ bad,” Steve argues, and Bucky agrees.

“No,” he says, “you’ve committed worse war crimes.”

Tony, despite looking overwhelmingly pleased with his new wealth of information, interrupts to say, “And you! Are all set. I’ll get out of your hair and let you know when I have updates, shouldn’t be too long, Barnes _thank you_ for telling me about our dear friend’s stolen valor and Steve, I will see you…whenever.”

He exits the room and leaves a contrasting silence behind him.

“You’re a jerk, you know that?” Steve says after a minute, smiling. Bucky ignores him.

“This one is even more of a flashy showboating son of a bitch than his father.” Which, well, is a pretty true statement.

“Yeah. ‘S genetic, unfortunately. Hey–” Steve holds out his hand. “C’mere, Buck.” Bucky takes it and lets Steve tug him forward, wrapping him in a hug. “That went well and now it’s behind you. Don’t worry about it, okay?” Bucky doesn’t respond, but he nudges his chin over Steve's shoulder and relaxes minisculely, so Steve’ll take that as a win.

——

The thing about knowing is that just because he knows something _is_ wrong doesn’t mean he knows how to fix it, and just because he knows how to fix something doesn’t mean he _can_.

He knows what the problem is with his arm and he knows how to fix it. He knows that it fucks up his weight and balance and probably his spine and he knows that all of that adds on to the mental shit he has to wade through day after fucking day. He knows this because Steve hasn’t been afraid to bring it up, and moreover, because it’s _his fucking arm_.

He knows to sit down and let Stark and whatever technician work until he’s not lugging around a useless fucking hunk of metal that warps him mind and body.

But that doesn’t mean he _can_.

Because what he doesn’t know, now, is where the point of no return lies. He used to, used to know what behavior would get him shot because they couldn’t get him sedated, used to know what caused erraticism and aggression and, in turn, what erraticism and aggression caused him.

And now he doesn’t.

And, to Rogers’ inevitable regret, his capacity for choices does not extend to whether or not he goes fucking postal on a group of (in this instance, well-intentioned) scientists. Nor does he know what might cause his going fucking postal. It’s not like Hydra ever gave him many options for operations; whatever they used to paralyze him didn’t put him to sleep or numb the pain at all, being strapped to a super-powered assassin-withstanding operating table didn’t give him much of an escape; his best choice was to kill the nearest technicians when possible and get a hand on their firearms and when that failed him, to check out entirely.

And now none of that is a fucking option.

And Steve, Steve’s friends, might be annoying bastards half the time but he hasn’t killed anyone in…months, he realizes, hasn’t since he arrived at Steve’s, and maybe it’s taken an embarrassing amount of fucking effort at times but he hasn’t and he’s not about to start now. Save for any fucking Nazis that crop up again, he doesn’t want to.

So killing everyone: not an option. Dissociating is, but is ill advised: see first option. Not going through with the whole thing: an option, but not one he wants to take. As much as the useless hunk of metal is _his_ , it’s his arm and no one gets to take that away from him, he doesn’t necessarily want it anymore.

And that’s his choice.

He’s also fucking sick of thinking about it, and it’s his choice to distract Steve from whatever sketch he’s working on because it’ll be there in the morning and right now he’d rather have Steve’s mouth on his and not have to think about what the hell comes next. Besides, if Steve is going to end up nagging him about sleeping in an actual bed, sex isn’t a bad way to get there.

For once, he sleeps without trouble. Steve is awake come morning time, the apartment already smelling like coffee and a hint of cinnamon from Steve’s oatmeal, the ridiculous little cat is curled up next to his head and occasionally hits his face with her tail when she swishes it. The clock across the room reads 9:16 am. He sits up and cracks his neck.

The cat chirps and stretches alongside him, then climbs over to sniff at his lap. He picks her up and stands, sets her on his shoulder and goes into the living room to find Steve.

“You sleep well?” Steve says warmly from the couch, no hint of sarcasm. Bucky shrugs, then nods because he slept as well as he ever does. Maybe better, since he doesn’t actually remember the nightmare that wrenched him awake around three. “I’m glad, Buck,” Steve says. “I gave Alpine breakfast, but do you want anything?”

“No,” Bucky says, throat a little hoarse. “‘S okay. Coffee?”

“Should be some in the pot still.” He drops the cat on the floor to weave between his legs while he pours himself a cup. He sits down next to Steve, who is back to working on the sketch from the night before. He stretches out and leans back against the couch and tries to find a position that doesn’t make his neck scream in agony. In the end, Steve shifts his arm and sets a hand on Bucky’s shoulder to coax him into relaxing against Steve, his head on Steve’s shoulder.

It’s stupidly embarrassing just how much that helps him release tension, how if he’s touching Steve then he doesn’t need to have every single fucking guard up. In his defense, the position makes his muscles stop burning, the pain lessening into more of an easily ignored throb, so at least he can claim plausible deniability.

“You tweak your neck again?” Steve asks, as if it’s not obvious. Bucky hums. “You wanna lay down, stretch out?”

“Can’t drink coffee laying down,” Bucky says. Steve laughs a bit, or exhales in a way that’s bordering a laugh.

“Okay,” he agrees. “Finish your coffee and then you can stretch out.”

“Worrywart.”

“Yeah, but you’re not doing any favors to your muscles by being all pretzeled up.”

“Pretzel isn’t a verb,” Bucky deflects, knowing damn well that Steve is right.

“Sure it is. If you let me move I’ll go look it up.”

“Unnecessary,” Bucky mutters, and he lets the cat hop onto his thighs while he drinks his coffee.

He does end up laying with his head on Steve’s thigh and managing to rest while _Nova_ plays in the background. Claustrophobia forces him out and onto the roof around midday, where he waits it out, and when he comes back inside there’s a fresh pot of coffee and some type of stew bubbling away on the stove. Steve finds him on the couch and kisses him and the dumb cat meows her complaints about not being the center of attention for two seconds.

All in all, there’ve been a lot worse days.


	7. Chapter 7

To Steve’s profound relief, Bucky’s tension gradually decreases following their visit to Tony. He’d be worried, privately, that it wouldn’t and Bucky would be at the same level of wary distrust and exhaustive anxiety and paranoia that he had been at at the tower and in the couple days following. Which is not to say that the wary distrust and exhaustive anxiety and paranoia is gone; Steve’s understanding is that there’s always a baseline of distrust and anxiety that Bucky lives with, and that baseline is way higher than most people’s. Steve can’t really blame him for that. But as the days pass, Bucky ebbs back closer to that baseline, and Steve’s thankful.

He mentions it to Sam once, after his run when he’s sat down outside a bakery with his coffee and just finished relaying the whole experience of actually visiting Stark. Sam doesn’t respond immediately, doing what Steve’s come to think of as his counselor-silence while he thinks out how he wants to respond.

That’s something else that Steve’s thankful for, the genuine thought that Sam puts into his replies. It reminds him of the early days of Bucky’s return, when Sam had told him, _“Look, I don’t know if you’re royally messing up, because no one has a degree in brainwashed Nazi super-assassin rehabilitation. You’re doing the absolute best you can, and as long as you’re supporting him and treating him like he’s human and he’s not entirely insane, I’d say you’re doing pretty well.”_ It was that candidness that made Steve feel far more appreciative than he would have if Sam had offered ingenuine platitudes. It was also what solidified Sam as trustworthy with Bucky-related topics, even if Steve was still pretty sure that Sam thought Bucky was going to end up being the type you can’t save.

At the time, Bucky was still confused and probably psychotic more often than not, but Sam did say ‘entirely’, so Steve did his best not to worry and fuss. Bucky is a lot more lucid and grounded nowadays, and his refusal to acknowledge any progress doesn’t mean that it’s not massive.

Now, Sam ends his counselor-pause by asking, “How’s he sleeping?”

“Uh,” Steve says, taking a pause of his own. “Alright? Still not every night I don’t think, but if he won’t sleep he’ll at least come and lay down next to me and close his eyes for a while.”

“That’s good,” Sam says. “l mean, chronic fatigue is a bitch and a half to deal with, and from what you’ve said, he definitely is. It’s not healthy to be _that_ tightly wound up all the time and then it just…compounds. Tiredness makes worsened anxiety, worsened anxiety fuels sleeplessness, sleeplessness makes tiredness. Rinse and repeat. Seriously, even if you don’t get the whole clusterfuck that probably is his brain–” Steve lets out a dry laugh. “–You have to admit that it must be fucking exhausting to live like he does. So I’m glad he’s sleeping at least semi-regularly, and resting when he can.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “I am too.”

“And how’re _you_?”

“Huh?”

Sam chuckles. “I asked how _you’re_ doing with this. Everything. ‘Cause I know it’s stressful for you too, even if you won’t admit it.”

“That’s a good question,” Steve says, because it is, and also because he doesn’t actually have an answer ready. “Overall, I’m good. He’s doing well, all things considered, which makes it easier. He yelled at me like, a month ago, to stop walking on eggshells so much around him, which was _hard_ because I was and I didn’t want to set him off. You know? And I have a few times—not like, full out, but things that clearly strike a chord—but he just tells me to fuck off or leaves the room.”

“Alright, that’s good,” Sam says. “Getting better at coexisting is good. You’re still telling me about Bucky, though.”

“Yeah,” Steve says with a sigh. “I’m good. Really. But I don’t know– I feel like he thinks I’m lying to him when I say that I don’t think he’ll hurt anyone. I can’t say it doesn’t make me anxious, and I mean, who’s to say? Maybe I wouldn’t be able to handle it. But if something goes wrong then I’ll just get Stark and Betty out and handle it myself. I’m pretty hard to kill, he’s already failed a few times.” The joke misses its mark, and Sam just hums.

“I wouldn’t rely too much on that,” he starts, and Steve quickly interrupts.

“No, I wouldn’t, but–”

“Hey, let me finish. I wouldn’t rely too much on that, but he was an Army sniper and then their assassin, he could’ve easily killed you on that helicarrier and chose not too. I’m not talking about your guys’ fist fight; he had plenty of headshots and didn’t take any of them and I’ve witnessed his aim in action so don’t try and tell me he missed. So yeah, Steve, no matter how badly it goes, I don’t think he’ll kill you, and I don’t think you’ll let him kill anyone else.

“It’ll suck the entire fucking way through, that’s for sure, but I’m confident you’ll all make it out alive.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “That’s about the size of it. I’m not concerned about what Stark is doing; he's annoying but I trust him not to mess it up beyond salvation. I know the engineering will be good, at least. Now it’s just…finding ways to make the suck less sucky.”

Sam laughs. “I know,” he says, “I hear you, and I wish I could help. That’s a conversation you gotta have with him though.”

“Actually, that reminds me,” Steve says more to himself than anything, but when he realizes Sam’s lack of response is to allow him to elaborate, he adds, “You know. He’s just…claustrophobic.”

Sam hums. “Smart,” he says. “Him feeling trapped is not going to help. Hey, I’ve got to get going, I have group, but you text me, alright? Email, if you like that better. Let me know what there is I can do to help.”

“Probably not much,” Steve says, “but will do. Have a good day, yeah?”

“Aye aye, captain,” Sam jokes. Steve’s mind goes flying back to Bucky nagging about his rank the week previous, which is something that only Bucky knew and Steve, frankly, hadn’t been counting on him remembering. (Which is not to say that Steve isn’t overjoyed that he does.)

He stops by the Russian bakery on his way home to pick up a loaf of bread and a couple of piroshkis. Bucky’s been having a hard time with food again—Steve’s pretty sure it’s anxiety induced, which unfortunately means there’s not a lot he can do to help—and even if the piroshki dough makes him sick, he's more interested in eating that than anything else, and Alpine is more than happy to eat whatever filling is inside.

Steve knows Bucky spent a good amount of time in Russia after the end of the war, has been able to piece enough together to know that he was based there from the end of the war until the early 2000s before being moved to the US, but still isn’t entirely sure where the affinity for Russian food came from. He can’t imagine that Hydra’s operations allowed for Bucky to go out and buy food for himself, not to mention that his file dredged up by Natasha contained a recipe for what must be a truly disgusting food slop that Steve wouldn’t in a million years want to replicate. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter: he might be curious to know, but food that Bucky’ll eat is still better than food that he won’t, so that’s what Steve’ll get.

Bucky’s on the couch when Steve arrives, his cat on his chest and looking exhausted. He’d been faking sleep when Steve left and Steve doubts he got much during the night, and can guarantee that he didn’t while Steve was out. That’s something that’s stuck around, too: even if Bucky isn’t quite so insistent about having one of them awake on watch while the other sleeps, he still won’t sleep without Steve there. Which is fine, really; it’s not like there’s any real reason for them to sleep separately. Why make an issue out of nothing?—and when it boils down to it, that's Steve's whole philosophy.

“Hey,” Steve says as he sets the bakery bag down on the counter. Bucky doesn’t look at him but raises his hand in acknowledgment. “You hungry? I got your piroshkis.”

“No,” Bucky says. “I already fed the cat. ‘S there coffee?” There is, so Steve brings him a cup along with his own when he goes to sit down, deciding to forgo the food issue for the time being and not point out that feeding Alpine does nothing to sway his own hunger or lack thereof. He ate last night, forced down white rice and a protein shake that Steve’s pretty sure he hates and uses as an absolute last resort and managed to keep it down, so he lets it go.

“You get any rest?” Bucky snorts. He sets Alpine on the back of the couch and reaches for the mug, shifts himself into more of a sitting position and winces.

“No,” he says, taking a sip. “But I still fucked my neck up.”

“So c’mere, let me do something about it,” Steve retorts, knowing that Bucky is in pain most, if not all, of the time, and that his mentioning it is tantamount to inviting Steve to fix it.

Bucky brings his coffee with him when he moves to sit between Steve’s legs. He’s gotten practiced in working out the knots in muscle that Bucky manages to build up, even if it doesn’t last for long. Anything is better than nothing, he remembers as he lays a hand on the back of Bucky’s shoulder to let him adjust to the touch, and it’s certainly better than the months Bucky went without letting Steve within arm’s reach of him.

Bucky doesn’t relax, exactly, but he settles after a while, drinking his coffee and petting Alpine, who hopped down from the couch to join him on the floor pretty much the second he sat. As Steve works his thumbs into a particularly tight spot in the curve of Bucky’s neck, Bucky flexes his left hand, staring at it.

“…At first,” he says, hesitantly. “They wanted to see if it would. Grow back. Regenerate. By itself.” His speech is choppy and stilted and Steve doesn’t dare stop working his hands over Bucky’s skin because he thinks that if he did, Bucky would stop talking. “And it didn’t. So they tried to make it– human transplants, things like that, none of their fucking grafts took because they were fucking fucked up sadists who had more fucking fun experimenting than fucking–” He stops abruptly and Steve can hear him struggle to get a grasp on his breathing. Steve’s hands have stopped moving but he hasn’t taken them away; instead he’s got them gently braced around either side of Bucky’s neck, rubbing one thumb over Bucky’s jawline. “It took a long fucking time to train me, and they didn’t need the arm until they were ready to deploy me, but it couldn’t get infected so they just. Didn’t fucking care.”

Steve leans forward and kisses the back of Bucky’s head while he grapples for a response.

“I care,” he says eventually, because at least that much he knows. “And so does Stark, even though he’s a piece of work. And that’s why we’re _not_ going to do anything reminiscent of that. Just replacing it as quickly as possible and you’re done. And if it’s starting to feel like it _is_ reminiscent of that, just say something, squeeze my hand, something– and we’ll stop. Okay?” As a hopefully humorous afterthought, he says, “And if Stark _did_ do anything unnecessary then I’d have to kill him and then Pepper would probably light me on fire with her Extremis fire stuff and it would all get very messy very quickly.” Bucky does laugh, a harsh choked-off noise.

“No you wouldn’t,” he says, and Steve chooses not to argue his potential for lethal violence. He just kisses the back of Bucky’s head again.

“How about we just don’t find out? I think that works best for both of us.” Bucky doesn’t respond to that. He sets his coffee on the table and cracks his neck, then stands, then looks unsure about what to do now that he’s standing. “You wanna come shower?”

Bucky frowns. “No,” he says, then sits back down on the couch next to Steve. “You go. I stay here.” Steve’s inclined to argue, but the resoluteness in Bucky’s voice makes him leave it. He showers and shaves and when he exits twenty minutes later, towel wrapped around his waist, he can see Bucky hasn’t moved an inch. He gets dressed, runs the towel over his hair again and chucks it in the hamper, then sits down next to Bucky.

“Hey,” he says, trying to gauge where Bucky’s head’s at. He stretches out to nudge Bucky’s foot with his own. “You with me, Bucky?”

“…They can’t sedate me,” Bucky replies after a minute, which is not an answer to Steve's question but serves well enough as one.

“I’ve thought about that,” Steve admits. “I know there’s a local anesthetic that works on me, but don’t know _how_ it works. And I mean, I don’t know exactly what they’re working with either, but I don’t think they’d need an all-out sedative. You want me to ask?” Bucky shrugs, which is a yes.

“I’ll just…there's no point. I burn through drugs. When I start to feel it and panic then it’s just…gone.”

“I’ll ask,” Steve says, not knowing how else to respond. “And whatever Stark says, we go from there, okay?”

“You could just shoot me,” Bucky offers, sounding hopeful. “I know that works for sure.

“Nah,” Steve responds easily. “Gonna pass on that one. Let me worry about logistics, right?”

“Right. I can’t just…not, it doesn’t work like that, I can’t on and fucking off my brain when I fucking please.”

“I know,” Steve says. He tugs the side of Bucky’s shirt until he stops being stubborn and leans into Steve’s arm, nestling his shoulder under Steve’s arm. Bucky relaxes marginally. Steve kisses the side of his head and reminds him, “Nothing we can do until we know,” because it’s true, and smiles a little when Bucky huffs and doesn’t actually move away from Steve.

So that’s something. Bucky’s as relaxed as he’ll get right now and he seems to have refilled his coffee during Steve’s shower and Steve’ll have to nag him into eating soon enough but there’s no reason to disturb the peace they have now, so Steve doesn't.

Stark’s response to Steve’s email comes a few days later and is eager and almost overwhelmingly earnest. It also seems that he has something against actually ending a sentence because the entire thing is one block of unpunctuated text, but that’s not really relevant. Isn’t at all, actually: what _is_ relevant is what the text says.

_STEVE_ , it reads. _Definitely no sedative needed or anesthetic maaaybe a LIGHT local paralytic but he’d be awake and aware the whole time it’s just to keep complicating twitches and movements to a minimum and he’d still be able to move everything else just not that arm plus we don’t actually know what would work on him even if u 2 are pretty similar_

_PS ask him if he wants his arm to be matte or shiny and more silver-grey or black-grey either is fine i just want to know and will probably be ready in 4-5 days once u email back_

It’s signed “Iron Man,” which makes Steve roll his eyes before he rereads it. There’s really no point in paraphrasing for Bucky, the email is concise and, thankfully, far more judicious than Stark is on a day to day basis, so Steve knocks on the door of Bucky’s bedroom and hands over the phone.

“Okay,” Bucky says quietly when he’s finished reading. “No paralytic. Dark grey. Matte.”

“Cool,” Steve agrees. “You–”

“You should go,” Bucky interrupts him, his voice tense. “You should– go. Not be here. Around me.”

Steve had only been planning on asking Bucky if he had anything he wanted washed when Steve did laundry later, but the thought is abandoned.

“Okay,” he says, “so when you _try_ to make me leave like that, it usually means I should stick around. You wanna tell me what’s up?” Bucky eyes him warily.

“No.”

“You mind if I come in?” Steve asks. The room is Bucky’s, after all, and Steve isn’t going to get in the habit of ignoring his domain, even when he’s pretty sure Bucky’s slept there a handful of times at most.

“No.”

So Steve sits and takes Bucky’s hand, squeezing. Bucky doesn’t say anything. Steve doesn’t either; instead, he takes his phone back and types out a response with one hand, more thankful than ever for autocorrect, because using the touchscreen is harder than a keyboard even with use of both hands, and he doesn’t want to let go of Bucky’s.

“This okay?” he asks, turning the phone to show Bucky. The message reads, _Bucky says no paralytic, and the matte dark grey. Let us know a date when you’re ready. There’s no reason for us to have any scheduling conflicts. Again, thanks._

_— Steve_

_P.S.: The postscript comes AFTER the script. Hence, *post*script._

Bucky snorts a harsh laugh at the end note, then leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes and sighs.

“Fuck,” he says. “Yeah. Good. Send it.”

“Okay,” Steve says, squeezes Bucky’s hand again, and does so. Then he pulls up the NPR sports podcast they’ve been listening to recently and shifts his weight to settle against Bucky’s side.

They’re halfway through a conversation on Lou Gehrig’s newspaper articles when Bucky tenses back up, drops his cat on his lap and says, “I can’t fucking stand it when you sit here and act like this is fucking normal. What, are you just going to fucking pretend that you can’t fucking see what’s right in front of you? You should be scared of me, Steve, any sort of rational fucking logic dictates that you should be scared of me, and you’re the only one that’s _not_ and how long are you going to keep up the fucking charade that it doesn’t wear on you every single day I’m here?”

He stops to think how to respond to that. It’s nothing Bucky hasn’t said before, argued in one way or another, but now’s not the time to start getting sloppy.

“It makes me upset,” he starts, carefully, “when _you’re_ upset. Not because of anything you’ve done, not like it’s your fault, but you don’t deserve it. No, really,” he says when Bucky manages to express years of cynicism in one look. “It makes me upset to know that you are in pain and having there be nothing I can do about it. I wish there was something I could do to make you be happier or more comfortable without totally throwing off…everything else that matters,” for lack of better words. “Forget normal, remember? Who the hell cares, Bucky. What I see right in front of me is my best friend no matter what.”

“Did you knock your head? Did _I_ knock your head? That’s stupid, even from you.”

Steve smiles at the mild jab despite himself. “Okay,” he says, “sure, fine. What am I supposed to see that’s right in front of me? The guy that rescued a stray cat even when the world was a terrifying threat just because she was hurt? Someone that’ll help their neighbor get her stroller up the stairs even when that means close contact with a stranger and you’d rather do literally anything but that? The person that’s been catching up on every Dodgers game he missed since ‘42? I’m not pretending anything. The last seventy years happened. Your job was to survive and escape and you _did_ and you haven’t seemed genuinely violent once in the entire time you’ve been back. _That’s_ what I see right in front of me, Buck.”

Bucky tensed up for the entirety of Steve’s speech, but his shoulder loosen ever so slightly when Steve rubs his thumb over the back of his hand. “You’re still an idiot. And it’s still a piss poor idea,” Bucky maintains.

“And it’s gonna go fine,” Steve says. “Stressful and miserable and exhausting. I know. I’m not delusional. But it’s gonna be fine. No one is going to get hurt and that includes you.”

“Whatever makes you feel better,” Bucky says, bland. Steve, seeing an opportunity, takes it.

“What would make me feel better is you not sitting on the floor and getting your back all worked into knots.” The look Bucky gives him is equal parts bitter and exhausted, but he does get up to go lay on the living room couch, and that’s already more than Steve’d been expecting.

It’s no surprise that the days start to get harder. Longer, it feels like, although Steve knows that’s not actually true. It’s no help that his and Bucky’s anxieties feed off one another, compounding, making the tension in the air palpable until Steve has to open the windows in the hope that it’ll be a placebo.

Most nights, Bucky’ll lay next to Steve in bed, resting if not sleeping. Sometimes restlessness drives him up, sometimes paranoia, sometimes inward frustration. Sometimes, Steve imagines, the fact that it gets boring to lay there for seven hours (give or take) while Steve sleeps next to him.

Bucky’s actual sleep, though, is sparse. When he manages to, it’s brief, a restless hour or two on the couch, something that’s classified more as dozing than truly sleeping. He’s trying, and Steve appreciates as much, because sleep deprivation is the opposite of helpful, and he thinks that goes doubly so for Bucky. And even more frustratingly, Bucky’s attempts at sleep are repeatedly interrupted by nightmares. This is standard—even if he usually wakes up due to nightmares, they’re of the type that he can shake off with a glass of water and a lap around the apartment to double check all the locks. If he can’t get back to sleep, it’s not the end of the world, because he’ll still rest.

The last two times he’s attempted and failed at sleeping, Bucky grabbed for a knife the second he was conscious. This time, it’s out of its sheath before Bucky is even finished waking up. He all but falls off the couch, the knife hitting his right leg and slicing into his jeans and probably upper thigh, his knuckles white around the handle.

“It’s okay,” Steve says quickly, his own arms resting on his knees, the empty palms of his hands clearly facing outward. “You’re home, Bucky, it’s just a nightmare. Whatever you saw, it wasn’t real, you’re safe.”

It’s not enough to stop the impending panic attack, and Bucky doesn’t put the knife down, but whatever the dream was, Steve can tell that he’s broken out of it. Thankfully, because it’s always far worse to have to try to convince Bucky that no, he _hasn’t_ woken up to being back in Hydra’s possession and no, Steve isn’t his handler.

“Fuck,” Bucky gasps. His hair is limp with sweat and hanging around his face in a way that Steve can’t imagine is very comfortable, so he passes over the hair elastic that now permanently resides on his wrist.

“You’re okay,” Steve repeats, moving to join Bucky on the floor between the couch and coffee table. “It’s okay, we’re safe. You want to put the knife down?” Bucky shakes his head. He pulls his knees up and crosses his arms over them, resting his head on the metal one. “I’m going to touch you,” Steve warns, “it’s just me. Don’t freak out.”

Bucky still flinches when Steve’s hand touches his back but relaxes quickly, letting Steve rub circles over his sweat-damp t-shirt as he hyperventilates. He’s not about to pass out—which is, unfortunately, another thing Steve can gauge from experience—so Steve doesn’t try to intercede.

When Bucky’s breathing has slowed and his trembling has turned to more of a slight shiver, he lifts his head.

“What time’s it?” he asks, a little slurred.

“Almost eleven,” Steve says. “You fell asleep around eight-thirty.”

“Not too bad,” Bucky responds. He then adds, “ _Yes_ , it could be better, it could always be fucking better,” which wasn’t something Steve was going to say but also isn’t something that he’s presently going to argue. “There coffee?” 

“Yeah,” Steve says with a smile. “There’s coffee. Gimme your mug, you stay there– Really. Sit. Pet your cat. You just had a panic attack while only half awake, Buck, you can relax for a damn moment. Get your jeans off and tape up your leg, I think you cut yourself without realizing it.” The look Bucky gives him is halfway to bitter, but he hands over his coffee mug for Steve to refill while Bucky goes in search of Alpine. Steve hears a faint cat noise and then, in Russian, “If I’d known you’d be so annoying I would’ve left you alone.”

Steve grins and sticks his blueberry waffles in the toaster. Bucky drops Alpine on the floor and Steve hears him tear open bandages and go through the motions of tending to a wound he doesn’t think needs tending to. After, he comes up behind Steve, wrapping an arm around his waist and leaning his forehead against the back of Steve’s neck.

“You want waffles or should I make toast?” Bucky sighs against Steve's skin.

“Neither?” he says hopefully.

“You eaten since Tuesday?” Bucky sighs.

“Fuck off. I don’t _want_ either. I will eat toast if you don’t make eggs with it.”

“No eggs if you have a protein shake.”

“You’re a worse fucking pain in the ass than my cat.”

“Deal?”

“I hate you,” Bucky says while he takes a shake can from the fridge. “Put it in when yours is done?” Steve agrees and pulls Bucky in for a kiss before he leaves and pretends he doesn’t see Bucky’s eye roll.

Bucky can relax again, thankfully, once he’s eaten and drank most of the protein shake. He’s tired, that’s clear, but he also seems content to lay half crooked under Steve’s arm and watch the previous night’s baseball game on tv without berating himself endlessly for feeling like an imposition. Steve takes his left hand and Bucky pulls away out of habit, then sighs and reaches back out to hold Steve’s, flesh fingers interlocking with metal.

Bucky’s dozing by the sixth inning, and Steve is silently relieved. For him, at least, sleep isn’t normal. He can go a few days without it and be fine, but the effect is pretty quick to appear after 48 hours or so, and it’s not like there’s any reason not to sleep nightly. Bucky, though, doesn’t abide by the same schedule, and seems to disregard sleep entirely unless he’s mentally worn down or his body can’t keep going without it. Right now it’s both, and managing to snatch a few more minutes while tucked into Steve’s side is a blessing, and even more so when Steve can pull the throw blanket over both of them without waking Bucky, who didn’t bother with putting pants back on after cleaning up his leg.

He rewinds to watch the ninth when he wakes up, because, “what’s the point of putting on the damn game if you can’t watch the end?” It’s right around that time that Steve gets another email, this one saying, _Arm’s all ready for you to come by whenever you want i can just clear my schedule if something else’s happening. Let me know when_ , with no sign off.

This one, he doesn’t show directly to Bucky. First he writes back, _Will do. Fair warning: he’s going to appreciate it and be entirely incapable of showing it. Also, I want to make sure we are all on the same page. Bucky now is not the person they made him into. Things he did weren’t his fault and can’t be held against him._

_But thank you_ , he finishes it up, and _I’ll let you know as soon as I do_.

Then he closes the laptop and leans his head on Bucky’s shoulder and takes his hand.

“So,” he starts, and Bucky immediately jostles Steve’s knee with his own.

“There’s two more outs, Rogers, you can wait,” he says, and Steve smiles, moves to kiss Bucky’s shoulder where he was resting his chin. He’s thankful for Bucky’s recent intense interest in baseball because, if nothing else, it lets him sit and watch for a few hours without feeling the obligation of needing to do something productive. Plus, baseball games make good ambient background noise and have been the first thing that Bucky’s had a deep and genuine opinion on aside from Alpine and her general well-being, and opinions are good. Human. Even if it means Steve listens to numerous daily grumbles and rants about O’Malley’s move to LA.

The Dodgers win and Bucky stretches, sighs, and lets go of Steve’s hand to pick up his cat and place her on his chest.

“New arm?” he guesses, voice tight and intonation flat.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Whenever you’re ready for it.”

“Fuck,” Bucky sighs, and for a moment he just sounds…weary. Not tense or angry or resentful, emotions which he always feels in relation to himself first and foremost, but just worn out. “No point in putting it off, it’s not like I’m exactly busy.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Bucky says. He leans his head back against the couch and closes his eyes. “You know, I still think it’s a bad idea.”

“I know. And I still disagree. And I’m going to be there the entire time.” Bucky squints one eye at Steve.

“Self-sacrificing idiot,” he says, but he moves Alpine to the floor and moves himself to straddle Steve’s lap and kiss him in one swift movement, so Steve doesn’t bother with a retort.

Bucky doesn’t sleep that night and Steve wasn’t expecting him to. Instead, he makes two attempts at eating toast again for dinner and throws up both times before he lays down on the couch, worked up enough that he’ll use Steve’s thigh as a pillow with minimal griping about it, and stays there until Steve manages to convince him that the bed’ll be more comfortable. He does actually stay laying down for a while, which is more than Steve was expecting, but is restless and tense. Sometimes that ends up with Bucky between Steve’s thighs and his mouth on Steve’s neck, but tonight it just makes frustration and exhaustion turned inward to himself.

Steve does fall asleep eventually, holding Bucky’s hand and curled towards his chest. He doesn’t dream but sleeps restlessly until he wakes again to the bed empty and Bucky’s side cold, clearly not having been occupied for a while. It makes Steve concerned but not worried just yet, not when he can get out of bed himself and go in search of Bucky.

Awake in the living room with a sniper rifle (that Steve has never seen before, which he registers as kind of concerning) is where Steve finds him. The ottoman’s been pushed away but otherwise he’s in his favorite spot, back to the wall and knees bent with Alpine on top of them.

“Hey,” Steve says carefully, quietly, crouching down to his level. “Buck?”

“It’s me,” Bucky says, his voice even quieter in the otherwise silent living room. “I’m here. It’s fine.”

“Okay,” Steve says. He wonders whether he’s gotten predictable or transparent, with Bucky answering a question he didn’t need to ask. On second thought, he figures that he’s always been both when it comes to Bucky. “I’m glad, but I don’t think this qualifies as ‘fine’.” Bucky sighs.

“It’s as good as you’re going to get,” he says, “I can’t sleep and it’s a fucking joke to try and if I leave the fucking apartment then I’m going to end up fucking running and not coming back.”

“Thank you for staying.” And then, with curiosity over accusation, “Where’d the gun come from?”

“Under the bed.”

“I’m going to go get something,” Steve says, “I’ll be right back, yeah?” Bucky nods, albeit minutely, and Steve goes to get a few things from the bedroom. Blanket, Army sweatshirt, the box from an Amazon shipment that now lives on the dresser with an old flannel tucked on the bottom for Alpine.

“What the fuck are you doing, Steve,” Bucky asks wearily when Steve hands him the sweatshirt and box. Steve hits him with a bland look to match his tone and responds, “Take a guess.”

“Steve–”

“Put on the damn sweatshirt and put Alpine in her box and relax as much as you can, okay? Don’t argue about it, everything’s fine, nothing bad is going to happen, I’m right here and will still be when the sun comes up.” He bends down to kiss Bucky on the top of his head and says into his hair, “okay?”

“…Okay,” Bucky concedes. He slips his hand under Alpine’s stomach and moves her to the box and moves the rifle across his body, diagonal, steady and ready and resting but not waiting. “Fine. Happy?”

“Happier if you could lay down with me.”

“Hate to fucking break it to you, Steve, but I can’t. Doesn’t work like that.”

“I know. It’s okay. I’ll be right here.”

When Steve’s settled on the couch under the blanket, Bucky moves himself and the cat in her box to sit between the couch and coffee table. The rifle’s now facing towards—well, in the same direction as—Steve’s head, and he’s not sure he’ll ever quite adjust to the number of guns and even higher number of knives in the apartment, but that’s a fair exchange for Bucky’s greater comfort.

He wakes again at sunrise. Bucky is still next to him but the gun’s set on the table now, he can smell fresh coffee and there’s a mug next to the rifle, Alpine’s still deep asleep. All are indicative of Bucky being more relaxed and hopefully a bit calmer than he was.

His voice is hoarse with sleep when he speaks. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Bucky says back. “You still snore.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s a statement of fact.” Steve smiles.

“Yeah,” he says, “I guess.” He sits, pushes the blanket down and runs a hand through his hair, the existence of truly embarrassing bedhead being something that hasn’t changed in seventy-odd years. Bucky flinches when Steve touches his right shoulder, but he always flinches and it took ages to convince Steve that he’d just move away if the contact’s unwanted, so Steve doesn’t move his hand and Bucky leans into it, lets his tension from the animalistic response to jerk away from pain lessen the longer Steve touches him. “It’s going to be okay, Buck,” he says.

Bucky sighs. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Think you can eat?” Bucky shakes his head with a harsh exhaled laugh. “‘Kay. I’m going to get coffee and shower and you let me know when you’re ready. No rush, I just thought–”

“I’d want to get it fucking over with as soon as fucking possible? Yeah, you’re not fucking wrong.”

Steve stands and pulls Bucky to his feet with him. He reaches forward enough for Bucky to be able to know what he’s doing and then holds his waist, his thumbs rubbing over warm skin. He rests his forehead against Bucky’s.

“I snore when I sleep on my back,” he starts, “and it’s going to be okay. Just statements of fact.”

“You’re fucking ridiculous,” is what Bucky comes back with before he pushes Steve towards the kitchen. He drinks his coffee with an episode of _Nova_ playing on the tv and Bucky cleaning the Makarov that lives hidden under the couch next to him. Alpine sneezes herself awake and then stretches her neck out to sniff and bat the cotton rounds to the floor and Bucky mutters something at her in Russian, most likely along the lines of “idiot cat.”

“I’m going to shower,” he says when his coffee is down to the dredges, “want to come with?”

“You know you ask that fucking constantly whenever I’m fucked up?”

“…No,” Steve says as he realizes that Bucky isn’t wrong. “I didn’t, actually. But the question stands.”

Bucky laughs, and this one _is_ an actual laugh with some amount of humor behind it, even if it’s short and exasperated. He shakes his head.

“Okay,” Steve says. He rinses out his mug quickly and kisses the top of Bucky’s head before he goes to find a towel. Alpine skitters after him and darts between his legs and meows when he closes the door on her.

The water is probably a little too warm; it burns his skin just slightly when it falls, but that’s what seventy years in the Arctic will do. The door opens, there’s an annoyed sounding _prrrroww!_ , and Bucky is all but crashing through the shower door and pushing himself into Steve’s arms, breathing more heavily than he should be.

“It’s okay,” Steve says before he’s processed a thing. He wraps his arms around Bucky and shuffles him forward, away from the spray of the showerhead. “It’s okay. I’m right here, Bucky, you’re okay but I need you to breathe for me.” Bucky shakes his head. Steve helps him sit down on the shower floor, disregarding the fact that Bucky’s still entirely clothed and is going to get soaked, and turns off the water. Bucky is still hyperventilating and shaking like he’s freezing.

“Bucky,” Steve repeats, trying to keep his voice steady. “Come on, I need you to breathe or you’re going to pass out, everything’s okay, I promise.” He holds out his hand. Bucky takes it, his grip tight and desperate like if he can’t hold onto Steve then he may as well not be there at all. “Deep breath with me.”

Bucky tries but promptly chokes, sputtering a bit.

“Good,” Steve says, “That's good, try again with me, breathe in.” This attempt is more successful; it’s still strained and shaky, but Bucky manages a full inhale and a more or less controlled exhale. He tries again and coughs, tries a second time to some success. Tries a third, a fourth, a fifth, until Steve doesn’t think he’s on the verge of passing out. His eyes are still more wild looking than Steve would like and he looks– Steve doesn’t even know how to describe it, desperate and terrified and resigned to it all.

He reaches out a hand. Bucky leans into it without hesitation and Steve rubs his thumb over Bucky’s cheekbone, feels a few days’ worth of stubble under his palm, tucks the hair behind Bucky’s ear and talks until Bucky seems as stable as he’ll get.

“Okay, Bucky,” he says. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” Bucky tries. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

“Buck.” Steve knows he doesn’t quite keep the sadness out of his voice, and immediately Bucky snaps, “Don’t pity me.”

“I’m not,” Steve says. “And yeah, it will be okay and _you_ will be okay, but right now it’s not and I need to know why, Buck.”

“You’re not actually that stupid.”

“Okay,” Steve allows, “I need to know what there is to do that helps, because I can’t just sit here and do nothing and I’m not going to buy it if you tell me that there’s nothing I can do to help.”

“Just…” Bucky starts, meeting Steve’s eyes for a fraction of a second and then looking away. “You. Being here. Helps enough.”

“Okay,” Steve says. The next question is risky, with a fair chance of Bucky using it to insult and demean himself even further, but Steve asks it anyway. “You don’t like not being able to see me right now?”

Bucky nods, looking at his wet jeans on the shower floor. Embarrassed. Bucky’s soaked clothing reminds Steve that he’s still naked and dripping with shampoo in his hair, and he tries to come up with the least harmful plan for the moment.

“Alright,” he says after his quick deliberation. “You want to get dry while I rinse off? It won’t take long.”

“Okay,” Bucky agrees, although Steve’s pretty sure it’s only because Bucky thinks he’s supposed to. Steve helps him up, grimacing slightly at the state of Bucky’s clothes.

“I have jeans and a t-shirt there,” he says, nods to the towel hanger. “Get dressed, okay? I can grab something else.”

“Not if you were going to–”

“Bucky.”

“Okay.”

Steve pushes damp hair off of Bucky’s forehead and kisses it, squeezes his hand before letting go and turning the shower back on. He keeps an eye on Bucky through his peripheral and is certain Bucky’s doing the same to him while he strips and towels off and pulls on Steve’s clothing. It doesn’t fit him, but not much does; he’s still thinner than he should be and his weight fluctuates like nothing else, and the only time he’ll wear any of the clothes that Steve’s bought for him specifically is when Steve’s run out of his own clean clothing for Bucky to steal.

Upon closer inspection, Steve sees that Bucky hasn’t so much dried off as moved the towel over spots that were wet. Steve dries off properly and wraps the towel around his waist and then reaches for Bucky’s, places a hand on the side of Bucky’s neck and coaxes him forward until Bucky bows his head and lets Steve dry his hair, stop the water from dripping onto his shoulders and making Bucky flinch at every hit.

When he too is dried and dressed and back in the living room with Bucky, he says, “This still doesn’t have to happen today.”

“Yeah,” Bucky sighs, “actually, Steve, it does, cause if it’s not fucking today then it won’t be tomorrow either and it won’t be the day after and it’ll never fucking happen.”

“Alright, Bucky.” He reaches out and touches Bucky's wrist—touches, doesn’t take—and when Bucky doesn’t pull away, Steve wraps him in a hug, his fingers drifting through Bucky’s hair while Bucky shakes against him.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he says, “promise, Buck, it’ll be okay.”

“Sure,” Bucky says. “Fuck. Alright. Let’s go.”

He spends the mercifully uneventful subway ride briefing Bucky on Betty Ross despite his certainty that Bucky’s read all there is to read about her online. Bucky, for his part, is surveying the train car every five seconds and more or less listening to Steve's briefing. He gets a wry smile at “Bruce’s not-girlfriend who actually is” and continues with, “but I’m pretty sure she just wants her work to be seen as _hers_ instead of Bruce’s and she gets enough trouble with her father as it is. She’s good, I think you’ll like her. And Tony, I mean, you know Tony–”

“Yeah,” Bucky says quietly enough for only Steve to hear, the first thing he’s said since leaving the safety of their apartment six stories up. He nudges Steve’s foot with his own. “You’ve got yourself a fan.”

Steve looks around and waves at a boy who can’t be any older than seven or eight staring at him with wide eyes. The boy tugs on his mom’s sleeve and points, and his mom immediately tugs his arm in, says something that Steve presumes to be along the lines of “it’s rude to point,” and then gives Steve a look of her own, of the sort that Steve is more familiar with. Less childish wide-eyed awe and more of the “oh my God you're Captain America, but we’re both New Yorkers so I’ll pretend to be unfazed by this” look that he gets most often from adults.

For what it’s worth, Bucky looks thoroughly amused by the entire situation.

They get to the Tower with no trouble. Steve checks them both in while Bucky continues to account for everything and everyone within sight, the security guard directs them to the 22nd floor with an overwhelmingly chipper “have a good day!” and then Steve is pushing the door open to what is, in essence, a lavish hotel suite. It’s not overdone or garish or even particularly extravagant, any of which could be expected of Tony. It’s just…nice. Well-lit, with the wall between room and balcony actually being a huge window flooding the whole suite with warm sunlight, plenty bright to see by. Steve hadn’t thought to mention that to Stark but now, standing here, is thankful for his insightfulness, since there certainly wasn’t a lot of natural light in whatever cells and rooms and torture chambers that Bucky was kept in for decades.

Niceness, however, does not deter Bucky from doing a thorough debugging of both living room and bedroom areas. He comes up empty handed as Steve expected and then stands, looking out of place and unbearably anxious.

“Here,” Steve says as he sits down on the edge of the bed, kicks his legs up and leans back. Bucky follows, stares at Steve for a second, and then perches next to him. Steve lays his left hand on Bucky’s hip and after a moment Bucky moves himself between Steve’s legs, only resting back against his chest when Steve tugs at his shirt and wraps an arm around his abdomen. Steve nestles his head over Bucky’s shoulder and kisses the side of his neck, then snakes his right hand around to interlace his fingers with Bucky’s, his palm on the back of Bucky’s hand and rubbing his thumb in what he hopes is a comforting way.

Steve’s pretty sure that there are stone statutes that would feel less tense than Bucky does right now.

His phone chimes with a text from Stark ( _sending Betty over now, I’ll be there in ten_ ) that he shows to Bucky, who sighs and tilts his head back on Steve’s shoulder.

“I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“You won’t have to. And if you did—which you won’t—they’d deserve it.”

“I killed a lot of fuckin’ people who didn’t deserve it, Steve, don’t be stupid.”

“And you didn’t deserve to be made to kill those people. Not their fault and not yours.”

“We gonna fucking do this now?” Steve grants him the out and leans the side of his head against Bucky’s. Squeezes his hand. Breathes in, out, in, out. Waits.

There’s a knock on the door and Steve reminds Bucky, “it’s okay, breathe, you ready?” and when Bucky nods, he invites Betty in.

The first thing he thinks is, she doesn’t look like a doctor. She’s in nice jeans and a t-shirt with her hair back in a ponytail and if she’s wearing any makeup, it’s not visible to Steve. His second thought is that of course she doesn’t look like a doctor, her expertise lies in biology and not medicine, even though his subconscious was expecting scrubs and a lab coat.

She doesn’t offer a handshake when she introduces herself to Bucky, either, and Steve wonders if Stark forewarned her about Bucky’s near-all-encompassing aversion to touch or if it’s just evident enough, if she's just perceptive enough. It is, admittedly, not that hard to figure out from Bucky’s body language.

Bucky says, “okay,” and Steve realizes he hasn’t actually processed a word of what Betty’s said so far. He hums inquisitively, enough for Betty to repeat herself with a smile.

“I asked how you two were doing,” she says. “And I’m glad to hear you’re doing okay. Tony should be here in a few minutes, I just wanted to run over some things with you first. Sound good?” Bucky nods and presses himself back into Steve’s chest. “Alright. First things first, James, is there’ll be no sedative or anesthetic or paralytic. The part that we’re actually working on is here–” She circles her hand around from her own armpit to shoulder, where Bucky’s arm is a metal socket instead of flesh and bone. “–so it’s just the base. Your muscles might feel a little tight or sore, but that’s normal. It shouldn’t take too long; I would say an hour or so. We’ll get your current arm off and replaced, and then we’ll fix up the wires that send signals from your brain to your arm. You with me so far?”

“Yes,” Bucky says, and Steve nods.

“The next part,” Betty continues, “is up to you. You know the feeling when your arm or leg goes numb? How it gets kind of staticy feeling?” She wiggles her fingers to demonstrate. “We expect you’ll feel a sensation like that when there’s no connection between your arm and the wires are just picking up what’s essentially dead air. It won’t hurt, but it might be unpleasant, and I have this…well, I don’t know how to describe it, exactly. It’s like a magnet that confuses the sensory neurons so your brain won’t know how to translate the dead air into that staticy feeling. It would just lay right under your arm. That’s an option, if you want.”

“…Okay,” Bucky says. Steve is doubtful of how much he actually is processing but doesn’t say anything.

“Okay as in you get what I’m talking about, or you want to give it a try?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to,” Betty says easily. “Just let me know. I can ask when it would be time, anyway. Tony’s going to be the one working with you, but I’m still going to be around; he's a good person but gets _so_ overwhelming and I thought it might be more comfortable if there was someone else who could tell him to shut up and focus.”

Steve thinks Bucky smiles at that, or laughs a little, as indicated by the sharp huff of air. He hasn’t relaxed at all, his muscles still feel like they were chiseled out of marble under Steve’s touch, but Bucky’s content where he is, or at least gives no indication of wanting to move.

“I can’t think of anything else,” Betty says. “It’s honestly pretty straightforward. If you need a break or want to stop at any time, that’s okay, just let us know, alright? Any questions?” Bucky shakes his head. “You guys want something to drink? There’s– well, there’s whatever you want really, but there’s stuff for coffee and tea in here. Or just water.”

“Water would be good,” Steve says, and then squeezes Bucky’s hand and murmurs low enough for just him to hear, “I’m going to move ‘n sit next to you, hmm?” Bucky squeezes Steve’s hand in lieu of a spoken response. Steve maneuvers himself from behind Bucky and meets Betty at the minifridge in the living room space, smiles and says, “you know? Not so bad. Spare this, I might even say ‘good’,” when she asks how he’s doing.

“I’ll give you a heads up,” she says, conspiratorial. “Stark is planning a Fourth of July-slash-Captain America’s birthday party. Wants it to be a surprise, God knows it’s not like he doesn’t have enough day to day spontaneity and imagine getting invited here the night of your birthday, it wouldn’t be that much of a surprise at what he’d planned. Still thought, if you come, might be nice to not be guessing at his intention.” As Steve processes, less taken aback by the idea and more considering what he’ll do about it, she adds on, “And he’s _staunchly_ anti-fireworks, for what it’s worth.” Steve can’t help it: he grins.

“I’ll forget you said anything so I can be surprised all over again,” he responds, accompanied by an exaggerated wink. Betty laughs. Steve, who forgets about the importance of self-limitation, twists the screw cap off of the water bottle and splashes himself with water when the top half of the bottle twists with it.

His now wet t-shirt clings to his torso and both Bucky and Betty are laughing at him. Betty apologizes for it, covering her laughter behind her hand, which Steve waves off because it _is_ funny. Bucky looks thoroughly amused and entirely unapologetic.

“James,” Betty says while Steve makes his way back over to the bed. He sits cross-legged to Bucky’s right and offers him the water bottle, which he takes, forcing himself to meet Betty’s eyes. “Would you rather we keep you updated with what we’re doing as we go, or would you rather we just let you know for the important stuff?”

He looks to Steve. “I can’t answer for you, Buck,” Steve says apologetically. “This one’s gotta be you.”

Bucky frowns and says, “I don’t know,” quietly. He hands the water bottle back to Steve, who screws the cap back on and then takes Bucky’s hand again, intertwining their fingers. “Important stuff?”

“You asking what it is or saying that’s what you want?” Steve asks, trying to sound gentle, because the distinction is one he’s not sure Betty would pick up on.

“Saying?” Bucky says quietly. Steve squeezes his hand and kisses his knuckles.

“Okay. Bucky, don’t worry about eye contact—yeah, I noticed and yeah I’m gonna bring it up, ‘cause no one’s expecting you to. It’s okay. Seriously.”

“Idiot.”

“Yeah, alright. Still true.” Bucky closes his eyes and huffs quietly. Steve lays his hand on Bucky’s right leg, rubs his thumb back and forth over the skin. “Don’t stress yourself out any more than you already are, hm?”

Bucky’s affirmative hum is accompanied by another knock on the door and then there’s Stark, briefly talking to Betty and then turning his attention to Steve and Bucky, greeting them with a very enthusiastic “helllll- _lo_!” Bucky attempts a smile and Stark steamrolls ahead. “So! Betty should’ve given you two the rundown on everything, frankly I’d like to get this over with as quickly as we possibly can because I don’t think it’s going to be fun for any of us. Recap on the important stuff: no drugs of any sort, you shouldn’t feel any pain and if you do then you need to tell one of us, like, right away. Same goes for if you just need a break. Betty says no to the play-by-play, that right?” They both nod in unison. Stark claps his hands. “Perfect. I will get set up, Betty, your help would be great here, you two good to just…hang out for a few minutes?”

Bucky nods again and the two disappear. He yanks his sweatshirt and t-shirt off with no finesse and drops them on the floor next to the bed as Tony and Betty return with equipment and a new arm. Bucky’s eyes go wide.

“Bucky,” Steve says urgently, “look at me. Come on, focus here, alright?” He shifts forward and wraps a hand around the back of Bucky’s neck, easing him forward until their foreheads are touching. “You’re okay. Nothing bad is going to happen, I promise, just focus on me.” He can feel Bucky breathing—too quickly—and squeezes his hand. From beside Bucky, Tony says, “okay. You guys ready?” Bucky squeezes Steve’s hand in response, closes his eyes, and swallows.

“Yeah,” he decides. “Okay. Ready.”

A part of Steve, the part that still puts faith in superstition, doesn’t want to say it goes well, just in case that jinxes the future. And it doesn’t go well, at least not in the sense that most people would think, but he was expecting that from the moment Bucky agreed. What he will say is, it goes smoothly, and with no outstandingly bad parts. Bucky looks more tense and strained than Steve would like, and pulls out a knife at one point, prompting Betty to quietly ask, “are we still doing okay, guys?” Bucky didn’t respond, but Steve sized up his hold on the knife—utility, not combat—and Bucky’s expression, his body language, and nodded.

“Still doing okay.”

Betty accepts that at face value and they continue. He’ll have to explain to her later that Bucky was just…overwhelmed, paranoid, stressed, and holding onto the knife the way a little kid might hold onto a particularly cherished stuffed animal or blanket for comfort, that Steve thinks the last interest he had in that moment was committing any act of violence.

All is well despite Bucky’s tight hold on his comfort-knife until Betty says, “okay James, we’re going to remove it, which is when you’d start getting that static feeling. It’s nothing going wrong, alright?” Bucky nods. Steve hasn’t been watching what Stark is doing, keeping his attention focused on Bucky and helping keep Bucky’s focused on him, and then Steve hears a _click_ and Bucky’s entire body seized up, still as stone.

“Betty,” Steve says quietly, carefully, as Bucky stares though him. He reaches out slowly, not touching Bucky yet but letting him know that he’s about to. “I’m going to need you to make that stop.” By the end of the sentence, his hand is resting on Bucky’s side, and he slides it up to cup Bucky’s face. “Bucky.” Bucky forces his eyes to Steve’s and Steve reminds, “hey, don’t worry about eye contact, it’s okay, just look at me, focus on me.” Bucky grits his teeth and nods, turning the knife over in his hand in a way that makes Steve more nervous the more he does it. Not that Bucky will get violent, but that they’re nearing the edge of a cliff that’s certain to kill them if they fall.

Gently, still trying not to startle Bucky, he guides his hand up to act as a blinder, putting ever-so-slight pressure on Bucky’s skin to get him to turn his head. “Hi,” he says when Bucky goes, “it’s okay. You’re okay.” Sentences he feels like he’s repeated a thousand times today already and will repeat a thousand more if it helps. Out of sight, Betty presumably stops the staticy feeling and Bucky all but slumps forward, leaning on his drawn up knees. Betty and Tony have both faded into the background and Steve doesn’t bother to see what exactly they’re doing before he tugs Bucky forward, wrapping him in a hug and feeling Bucky’s tension decrease by a notch.

“Fuck,” Bucky says. Steve can hear how hard he’s been breathing, how he’s almost panting. “Fuck. Steve.”

“Right here,” he responds, careful of Bucky’s left side as he rubs up and down his back. “It’s okay, you did good. You’re good. It’s okay.”

Bucky allows himself to lean a bit more forward and rest his forehead on Steve’s shoulder. Steve runs his fingers through Bucky’s hair, scratches lightly at the nape of his neck, does whatever he can to help Bucky calm back down. He presses a kiss above Bucky’s ear with no regard for Tony or Betty seeing.

“I can’t fucking do that again.” His breathing sounds more even but his voice is still ragged.

“I know.” He sees Betty shaking her head out of the corner of his eye and takes a chance with saying, “it’s okay. You won’t have to. You’re doing good, Buck.” Betty gives him a thumbs up and turns back to whatever she was doing to give them space. Steve’s thankful for the correct guess, unsure of where to go next if he’d been wrong. He finds the abandoned water bottle and holds it out for Bucky, who raises an eyebrow but drinks like he’s parched.

“Okay,” Bucky forces out. A drop of water falls from his chin onto his jeans. “Okay. Okay. Fuck. I’m okay.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, “you are, but you’re shaken, that’s okay too. Keep breathing, hm?” Bucky nods, letting Steve scoot forward so he can hold Bucky’s right arm without having to reach. “Can I move the knife?”

“Huh? Fuck.” Bucky notices the blade in his lap. “No, just– Close it.” Steve does and sets it back on Bucky’s lap, and Bucky seems to relax a little bit more; as much as he can. He meets Steve’s eyes for a fraction of a second, then squeezes them shut and blinks his vision clear. To Betty, he says, “Alright. It’s okay. You can go.”

“Okay,” Betty responds. Steve silently thanks her for not asking _you sure?_ instead, for taking Bucky at his word. “You might feel some pressure but that should be all, and let any one of us know if you want a break, okay?”

Bucky nods and resolutely turns his attention back to Steve. Tony moves back over from whatever he’d been doing in the meantime and Steve takes Bucky’s hand again, focus exclusively narrowed to the person in front of him.

There’s no gauge of time in the room, which doesn’t help with the entire process feeling insufferably long, but Steve manages to keep Bucky’s attention while Tony and Betty work, squeezes his hand at every flinch, whispers reassurances, and then Betty is moving around and Steve realizes Tony’s said both of their names more than once.

“Hm?”

“You guys are all set, we are going to get out of your hair, feel free to stick around for as long as you want and you can get a car home if you want just ask when you leave, let me know if you need anything else but otherwise I think we can go on with our day and put this behind us and all try not to think about it more than necessary?”

And then it’s just the two of them, Bucky staring very intently through the mattress until Steve tugs him over and wraps an arm around his shoulder. “C’mere.” Bucky all but falls into his arms, full weight on Steve as his breathing picks up. Steve can feel muscles trembling. Bucky turns into the crook of Steve’s neck, hiding, not that Steve would ever state the fact aloud.

“I can’t–” Bucky starts, then freezes again, tensing.

“It’s okay, Buck, it’s just adrenaline, you warded it off to keep yourself calm and now it’s just all hitting you at once. Just let it happen.” Bucky untangles himself from Steve’s hold and stands a little too quickly. He staggers to the side. Steve realizes in a rush how much he must have been skewing his weight for years to compensate for his left arm and he jumps up; Bucky doesn’t need his help in regaining his balance but accepts Steve's hand anyway.

“Fuck,” he says, still breathing quickly. “That’s– weird. Fuck.”

“I know. How about we go sit on the couch? Change of scenery?” Bucky nods. He allows himself to be led to the living room area and sits while Steve returns to the bed and grabs the throw blanket folded across the bottom. “Just in case,” he explains, and then sits in the same position he was previously. Bucky takes him in for a second and then sits between his legs, leans back against Steve’s chest facing the door. Steve tucks his hair back behind his ears, brushed strands from the back of his neck and lays down a kiss in their place. Bucky’s still shaking and on the brink of hyperventilation, but Steve can tell he’s trying to get a handle on it without getting himself more worked up. “It’s okay,” he repeats, “you’re okay. Promise.”

Bucky’s left arm is hanging, not quite dead weight, but like he’d rather not think about it being there. Steve can’t blame him for that; he leans back a bit more against the arm of the couch so Bucky can recline but otherwise doesn’t push anything. Bucky all but clings to him, but Steve won’t mention that either. Not when Bucky is so clearly worn thin and desperate for comfort. Steve isn’t in much of a hurry to ruin that comfort for Bucky.

Little changes when Bucky sleeps. He’ll lay in bed next to Steve when he can, but most of his actual sleeping gets done during daylight hours, or on the brink of them, while curled on the couch or floor between wall and bed. He doesn’t relax, body holding the same tension as always but simply gone still. Between Steve’s low stream-of-thought commentary and Bucky’s shaking, he doesn’t actually realize that Bucky’s fallen asleep in his arms until the adrenaline shaking turns to regular shivering and his rapid breathing becomes closer to the usual pattern of inhales and exhales.

Steve’d expected Bucky to keep resisting crashing until they got home, but it’s not like it’s a problem now. Sleep is a challenge and he’s not going to interrupt what Bucky does get. He’d planned on Bucky getting cold anyways, the way he always does after panic attacks, and just settles the blanket over him. He doesn’t stir, just tightens his hold on Steve's t-shirt and tucks himself in closer. Steve strokes his hair and keeps up the quiet monologuing. Time passes; Steve at one point also closes his eyes but doesn’t sleep. His phone’s on the opposite side of the room, and he’s not all that attached to it but it would be nice to have if only to combat boredom as they creep into the early afternoon.

There’s a knock on the door. Whatever part of Bucky's subconscious is alert and aware while he sleeps makes him tense up without waking, and Steve wraps an arm around his body and presses a kiss to the side of his head as Betty enters again. Steve raises a finger to his lips, thankful that it’s her and not Stark’s overwhelming presence despite the situational awareness he does manage to have.

“Hi,” she says quietly. “I was going to pop in and ask him to do some quick calibration things to introduce him to the precision and specificities, but I think we can pass that up. Try to get him comfortable with using it for everyday things and he should be fine. So you know, it’s not _un_ breakable but…I mean, Tony is Tony, so _effectively_ it’s unbreakable and it shouldn’t need any sort of maintenance so we won’t have to go through this again. Any questions?” Steve shakes his head. “Okay. You have my number, you have Tony’s, if either of you do have something just ask, okay?”

“Okay,” he agrees. “And thank you. From me and from him. Both of you. Thanks. I know it was…not fun and we just ignored you, but thank you.”

“Steve,” she says gently. “I know. And you’re welcome. From me and from Tony.” She pauses like she’s hesitant on asking but caves in. “You guys okay?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Or we will be. Soon enough.”


	8. coda

Steve spends a week hemming and hawing over whether or not he’s going to his not-a-surprise-party, only capitulating two days before when Bucky shoots his hair elastic at him from across the room, hitting him squarely on the forehead and saying, “You’re going to end up going anyways, so what the fuck’s the point with pretending you’re undecided? Tony gets to have his fun, you get to see your friends and eat expensive catering with no guilt, and I’d put money on the fact that Stark’ll have flown Wilson in. Stop being so fucking noble all the time and go to the damn birthday party.”

“Maybe,” Steve says in a way that Bucky knows is a yes. He shoots the hair tie back; Alpine intercepts it and carries her prey to the back of the couch to gnaw until it breaks. “You going to come if I do?”

“I can think of at least three types of torture that are more enjoyable than having multiple people jump out of a dark room while yelling.” Steve blanches.

“That’s not funny,” he says while very clearly trying to conceal a smile.

“Yes it is. I can probably come up with more types if you give me the time, it’s just hard. Brain electrocution does that.”

“Someone’s got jokes today.”

“I’ve got jokes every day, you just have a piss poor taste in humor.” Then he sighs, and matching Steve’s tone from earlier, says, “Maybe.”

“M’kay,” Steve says. He grabs Bucky’s mug from the coffee table and goes to refill it along with his own, taking the hair tie away from Alpine and chucking it at Bucky. The cat chirps indignantly and rubs her head against Bucky’s thigh.

“Yeah, stupid,” he says, “hi. You’re not getting this back, if I was going to let you choke yourself to death then I would’ve never gotten you in the first place. Fuzzy idiot pain in my ass.” Steve sets down both mugs and a granola bar accompanied by a pointed look. “ _You’re_ a pain in my ass, Rogers.”

“Yup. Shove over.” Bucky mock-glares but shifts and grabs the granola bar. “There a baseball game tonight?”

“Somewhere in the world, sure. No Dodgers game.”

“Want to go out to pick up dinner?”

“The fuck is this supposed to be?” Bucky asks as he holds up the granola bar, tearing off the corner of the wrapper with his teeth.

“Lunch,” Steve says, “‘cause I know you didn’t eat it and you had one packet of instant oatmeal for breakfast and coffee is not a meal.”

“Sure it is.” He takes a bite anyway, washing it down with the coffee to get the dry bland taste out of his mouth as quickly as possible. Steve grabs the tv remote and pulls up the _Nova_ show from their to-watch list, then pulls Bucky over to lean against him. He doesn’t bother pretending that he’s focusing on the episode—the background noise is nice, the dumb cat hops up on his lap to purr her dumb little head off while he pets her and Steve works away at a knot under his shoulder blade; the pain fades to a dull ache instead of a pulsing burn and even if sleep is still out of reach, he’s content enough to doze for a few hours until Steve nudges him awake to find whatever he considers to be a real meal.

He does manage to make himself go to Steve’s not-a-birthday party, for some value of ‘going’. He’s about to bail and find somewhere to wait out the duration, pretending he’s not hiding, but Steve’s so fucking earnest and--although he does a pretty good job at disguising it--excited that he can’t bring himself to actually dip out. 

“Welcome, Private Rogers, Sergeant Barnes,” replies the disconnected British voice when they step into the elevator. It makes Bucky’s skin crawl like nails on a fucking chalkboard, enough so that he has to actively make himself calm down and not pull out the knife in his pocket before he acknowledges the change in address. Steve isn’t even feigning annoyance this time, he just looks amused.

“You know,” he says over the chimes that signal floors going by. “I’m pretty sure I was posthumously promoted to captain, so the title still stands.” “You’re post-posthumously demoted back to private. I outrank you.”

“Sure,” Steve agrees, “that sounds about right. I was _acting_ captain; you think Falsworth would’ve listened to me if he’d known I was a private?” The elevator doors open to a small and tidy foyer and Bucky is blissfully saved from admitting that he has no idea what Falsworth would’ve done because those memories are still shot to shit. The cat, who’s been riding around inside his sweatshirt since they left the apartment, squirms her way out and wraps herself around Bucky’s ankles. “You hanging out here for a few minutes?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says with a sigh. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for. C’mere?” Steve pulls him into a kiss that Bucky lets drag on for a while, until Bucky knows neither of them will end up at the not-a-party if one of them doesn’t break it off, so he does, regretfully. “Take your time, hm? But I’ll see you?” He nods and Steve, with another kiss to Bucky’s forehead and a “love you,” to which Bucky rolls his eyes, goes through the double doors in front of him. The cat, a traitor, darts after Steve, but Bucky scoops her back up before she can slip through the doors.

“You’re a pain in my ass,” he says in Russian, holding her up and leaning his forehead toward her so she can bump her head up against his. “Yeah, I know. Annoying.” Through the doors he hears a chorus of happy birthdays, followed by the general applause that comes with, and the cat starts purring in his arms. “You know, you’re lucky I found you. Otherwise your paw would’ve gotten more fucked up and you would’ve been picked off by some hawk or stray dog or a brave fucking pigeon. Idiot.” She chirps again and sticks a paw against his cheek. He sighs and lets her down to the floor again. It doesn’t take her long to go back to wrapping herself around his ankles, her purr just as loud as it was when he was holding her.

He’s been trying to…keep track of time less recently, or at least do so less obsessively. He’s not sure if it’s been succeeding; he waits an unspecified handful of minutes for the noise inside to die down to a more conversational level before he slips through the doors with the cat in tow. The room is oddly shaped—it’s Stark-desgined, so of fucking course it is—but there’s a large comfortable sectional with its back to the closest corner-shaped part of the room that he settles into after a few moments of surveying the room and its occupants. He’s met few of them but recognizes all, and is unsurprised to see that Stark did indeed get Wilson to come from D.C., along with Natasha and Clint from wherever they’d last been. It’s still not long before Steve’s sitting next to Bucky again with a plate of hors d’oeuvres.

“All good?” he asks as he removes an outstretched white paw from the edge of the plate. Bucky nods.

“Soundproofing’s not bad.” He nods towards the window. There’s fireworks going off over the Hudson that are entirely inaudible inside, and the flashes of light don’t put him so on edge when they’re not accompanied by the sound.

“It’s not,” Steve agrees. “Want a strawberry?” Bucky takes one, mostly to indulge Steve, who sits back. Bucky shakes his head.

“Go talk to people,” he says, “it’s your birthday, birthday party, don’t just sit here.”

“Are–”

“Yes, I’m sure. Go.” Steve gives him a look for a minute and then squeezes his hand. He leaves the plate of hors d’oeuvres when he does, perpetually incapable of being subtle, but the idea of eating isn’t repulsive, so Bucky nibbles at the fruits and grumbles at the idiot cat when she steals a piece of salami from a baguette slice. Steve, for his part, does seem to be thoroughly enjoying himself; Bucky manages to force down the nagging part of his brain that reminds him _you’re the reason he never get to enjoy himself, can’t leave the house without worrying about the fucking play-acting imitation of a person he’s leaving alone, can’t live a normal fucking life thanks to your invasion_.

The cat jumps onto the back of the couch cushion and knocks her forehead against his shoulder, small and innocent and demanding he scratch her between the ears and purring her dumb little head off when he does so. It’s not bad, sitting there and watching without any intent. It’d be hard, impossible, for someone to get behind his spot on the couch without his noticing, and it’s not…he won’t say it’s good, knowing God, the bastard, will fuck him over for it, but it’s safe. Bordering comfort, as much as it can.

They end up spending the night. It doesn’t take that much convincing on Steve’s part. The cat’s already with him and it won’t be hard to get her food, the apartment isn’t soundproofed like the tower is, and Stark appears overwhelmingly eager to offer Steve one of the generic guest suites. He doesn’t listen in deliberately but Stark’s volume control is all but nonexistent (which results in an “indoor voices, Tony!” from Pepper) and his hearing means he doesn’t have to even try to listen to Tony’s enthusiastic, “and _may I remind you_ that you have a _whole entire floor_ that you haven’t even _looked_ at.”

“I don’t need a floor, Tony,” Steve says patiently. “I have an apartment.”

“I’m not saying you _move_ , but it’s a hell of a lot nicer than a guest room and that’s saying something because I know our guest rooms are nice but then you can decorate. Give it _personality_. Your roommate can use the walls for knife-target practice and you can turn it into modern art or whatever it is the two of you get up to. It’d be _fun_.” Steve looks over to Bucky when he’s mentioned, looking apprehensive, but Bucky’s just amused.

“Not tonight,” Steve says. “But yeah. Fine. Why not.”

“Excellent!” Stark declares. “ _Wonderful_ , Steve, do we get an interior decoration session? Pepper has people who do that, do you want me to send you her people? I can send you her people.” Bucky tunes them out, already tired of listening to Stark, and pets the cat until Steve comes over and nudges Bucky’s foot with his own.

“Ready?” he asks. “We’re apparently taking the entire rest of the cake with us.” Bucky stands and taps his chest and catches the cat when she leaps up. The guest suite JARVIS guides them to is nice, but definitely different than the one he was in before. He tries not to think about that, tries not to contaminante, fucking pollute what’s been a not-bad evening. The cat is happy to go sniffing around the suite and Steve puts the cake in the minifridge and meets Bucky in the living room, taking his hand again. Left hand.

“Hmm?”

“Just said hi,” Steve says, “you doing good?”

“Yeah.”

“Tonight was nice. Thank you for coming.” His free hand braces Bucky’s jaw, fingers brushing over bare skin.

“Yeah,” Bucky says again. “It was– I liked it. Being there.”

“Good. That makes me happy.” Steve kisses him gently, his arm going from Bucky’s face to wrap around his back. “Come to bed with me?” Bucky kisses him again, rougher this time, in lieu of an answer.

He sleeps without nightmares for the first time in a week.

The good day comes with a cost, one that’s admittedly somewhat self-inflicted by his forcing himself to go grocery shopping with Steve the next day when he’s already twitchier, sorer, and more headache-y than usual. He manages not to pull a knife on anyone, although it’s a close call when a college-aged girl in running gear accidentally bumps into him from behind. He makes Steve go sit down while he puts away the groceries, only to get as far as putting the lettuce in the crisper when his piece of shit brain stalls out and leaves him staring through the counter.

“Buck?”

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” he says, startled.

“Sorry,” Steve responds. “Behind you. Y’okay?”

“Fuck.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, squeezes his eyes shut and tries to get a handle on himself before he responds. “How long–?”

“Fifteen minutes or so.” Steve sets a hand on his lower back, then wraps both around his waist and nestles his head over Bucky’s shoulder. “What happened?”

“Nothing. Just fucking– got lost. Is all.”

“Wanna go sit?”

“No.”

“How about you put away stuff for the fridge and I get the cabinets?”

Bucky sighs “Okay. I’m sorry.”

“It’s just groceries.”

“Not for the groceries, Steve, and you know it.”

“Hey.” Steve kisses his shoulder. “It’s okay. Promise.”

He does put the cold items away while Steve gets the rest, sorts items into their respective cabinets when Bucky can’t for the life of him remember what goes where. Steve finishes his part while Bucky leans against the counter and then meets him there.

“Come sit down? It’ll be more comfortable.” There’s no real reason not to, so Bucky does. Steve maneuvers them to let Bucky settle between his legs and relax back against his chest, then turns on the tv and lowers the volume for background noise. Bucky doesn’t know whether he’s tricking himself or the pain is actually less, but it’s at least better to lay with Steve than stand in the kitchen, blanked-out on any sort of purpose.

Steve hums. “You know,” he says, “I’m happy you’re here. You make me happy. I missed you.” Bucky doesn’t know what to say to that, but he turns and kisses Steve. He leans his head against Steve’s neck and hums back.

“Okay,” he says eventually. “That’s good. It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> massive thank you to everyone who has stuck with this story and left kudos and comments and support. special mention goes out to [august](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiberivs) and [addie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cafelesbian), my two biggest cheerleaders with this fic, without whom i would not have the finished product i do today.  
> if you want to read more in this 'verse, please check out my series, [_this time-bound conscience_](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1517654), which i will continue updating for as long as i continuing writing in this world. as always, i can be found on tumblr [here](https://teenageraccoon.tumblr.com).

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on tumblr [here](http://teenageraccoon.tumblr.com)  
> 


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